For all we know, she will end up with a humanities as her top choice, and we won't even have to worry about difficulty :P
I don't think this really captures the spirit of these classes.
The only course my son, who had a 31 ACT reading score (7th grade), has taken through the TIP program so far was an e-studies course in the "humanities" section - Crime and Justice in America. According to the instructor's syllabus, it covered material at the level of a first-year law school course, and that seemed to be accurate. Because it was a summer course, they covered a semester's worth of material in 8 weeks. There was plenty of challenge - one of their assignments was to research and write an appellate brief - and there was a lot of technical information to learn, too. It just wasn't math-intensive. It did require extensive reading and quite a bit of high-level writing that involved the application of the course material to real-world scenarios. That said, the pre-existing knowledge base in the class varied a great deal, and from what I saw of the materials and the chats, the teacher did a great job of providing resources for students who had no previous exposure while not slowing the class down for those who already had some background.
I wouldn't assume that writing, literature, or social science courses aren't going to have large amounts of material to learn or that they will be easy just because they aren't STEM courses.
That not withstanding, your child should not go into *any* of these courses with trepidation. The purpose of taking them is not to make an "A", it is to learn, and to make connections with other gifted kids. Some of the students my son "met" online are now Facebook friends and e-mail correspondents. As much as he learned, and as much as he liked the challenge, the relationships he formed may have been the best part of participating.
The scoring rubric for the class is not going to be based solely or primarily on number of correct answers on tests. My son's instructor gave timely, thoughtful, and targeted feedback on every single assignment, and was more than happy to answer extensive, detailed and sometimes obscure questions through e-mail and the regularly-scheduled on-line chat sessions.
I can't speak to how TIP compares with CTY, but I can tell you that my son highly recommends TIP to anyone who qualifies for it.
