Upon looking into students' attitudes towards subjects being regarded as "hard" and "soft" subjects I found out that students often gravitated towards the "academic" subjects being classified as hard and "lesser-academic" subjects being viewed as soft. I tested this by looking online across various forums, mainly the student room, to which I found myself surprised to see such close minded and prejudiced individuals who bullied and ridiculed students for subject choice, claiming their subjects were not academic and soft subjects that they might as well drop out or do real subjects.
After studying such values for an extended period of time these attitudes do not surprise me and seem to be a cultural norm here in the united kingdom possibly due to the way that the government prioritises in education, mainly on memory recall and less on elaboration. (see below evidencing from OECD learning styles PowerPoint ) The United Kingdom is high in memorisation, the highest, and low in elaboration, the lowest.
Often note worthy when looking at actual values of students would be the rigidness of the categorisation of hard and soft almost to the point that these values have been instilled in them from a young age by a system of education. For example, "Anything with 'studies' at the end is probably on the soft side" This shows the typical view that some subjects just shouldn't be regarded as subjects even though they should be held on equal grounds. (see references)
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