<p>raiders83, your argument makes me think: Engineers are trained, while scientists are educated. Sorry to fall into the stereotype I mentioned earlier on. I’m not trying to be arrogant here, but the representation of engineering education by many posters is not very attractive, in my opinion. There is a place for processes, yes; but solving math problems is not it, even if they occur in an engineering course.</p>
<p>Please, correct me if I’m wrong about this. I haven’t had any college, I want to make sure there isn’t some underlying situation that I’m missing.</p>
<p>Teacher teaches students how to solve a problem using process x. Teacher gives test on solving said problem with process x. Student uses process y learned in another class to get correct answer. How does that show that the student understands what the teacher just spent a week teaching. If there was ever a place for processes, it’s to show you understand concepts in school.</p>
<p>It seems to me, eurekameh, that the question you need to ask yourself is whether you would be okay with having to solve problems in the professor’s pre-designated way, as long as that was specified explicitly, or whether you prefer to solve problems on your own. </p>
<p>I’ll hazard a guess that when someone is a professional engineer, if they solve problems in their own way, instead of using a pre-vetted procedure, it might cause difficulties with the firm’s insurance, even if the result is valid. Is this true?</p>
<p>I mean you’d be better off trying to make an argument that the course isn’t applicable to being an engineer in the real world, than trying to say that professor is wrong by not giving any credit.</p>
<p>raiders83, I didn’t see the requirement to used process x in the problem, from the OP’s post. The OP’s method was actually a little harder to use. I don’t doubt that the OP could also follow the process given by the professor, exactly. When you take college math exams, you tend to face a lot of unfamiliar problems, with many different possible approaches, and given the time pressure, it happens that people don’t notice the easiest way. A classic example of this occurs in integration, when there is a trig substitution or other change of variable that makes the integral easy to evaluate, and otherwise it’s pretty challenging. Math profs generally like it if a student solves the problem correctly, even if not using a “route” that was taught in class. For that matter, a lot of higher-level college math classes don’t teach any routes, and leave that for the student to figure out.</p>
<p>If they don’t usually care how someone gets to the answer, than that is being picky.</p>
<p>First off, your professor is not, as you assume, there to teach you. That’s perhaps a component of his duties, but you’re missing the point if you think he’s there to teach. He’s at the university to do research, and his advancement and tenure are dependent upon his ability to do research that brings in grant money. Good professors have a passion for teaching and a talent for research, but passion for teaching is not the university’s bottom line when it comes to putting someone on the tenure track. Let’s just make sure we’re clear on that… It’s just how it is.</p>
<p>Here’s what you need to know about engineering.</p>
<p>The people that you will be interfacing with as an engineer are quite often not going to be scientists. Presenting your responses in the clearest possible form is ESSENTIAL. Not doing so could result in lost lives. Straight up. We’re the last ones to apply the science before it’s sent out to the end user. In my field, I often hand my plans off to supervisors who don’t have a college education. If I am not crystal clear in my designs, if I do not express things within the confines of the system in which we all work, I still assume the liability for the safety of the building.</p>
<p>If you’re going to insist upon putting your own ego before learning the art and nuance of the practice of engineering, then sure, go ahead and find something more purely scientific to pursue. This is college. Not everything is going to be told to you before you see it on an exam. Part of how you learn the ropes of the field is by swinging face-first into the wall from time to time. </p>
<p>Take a deep breath , swallow your pride, and let this one go. This isn’t the last time someone will tell you that you’re wrong and you disagree with them. The difference between a successful engineer and an unsuccessful one is measured by persistence and a willingness to learn from one’s missteps, as opposed to waging battles over lost points. The ultimate objective of your college education isn’t to collect all the points that you are due. It’s to learn how to be a professional and to try to learn as much from your professors as you can such that you have the skills you need once you go out to design real stuff with the big dogs. You’re missing the forest with this obsessing over individual trees, and that more than anything, I guarantee, is at the heart of why your professor is ticked at you for points-fishing.</p>
<p>If you still don’t understand what I’m trying to tell you, then all I have left is to wish you good luck. You’re going to have a very difficult time advancing in your field without a willingness to let go of things and try to learn from them.</p>
<p>I think you might find this interesting.</p>
<p><a href=“https://files.nyu.edu/jh2844/public/index.html[/url]”>https://files.nyu.edu/jh2844/public/index.html</a></p>
<p>@aibarrr:
Again, I am letting it go; I accept that there is nothing I can do here and I’m moving on. I have learned something from this: that life can be a * sometimes. That is all there is to learn here; I knew how to do the problem both ways, but I should not have to be punished for choosing one way over the other. I have never experienced anything so unfair in my life before, and this is without a doubt the first and I am aware that it will not be the last. But the reason I am “waging over lost points” is because my grade is on the line here. 20 points off something I did right is outrageous. That is at least a letter grade drop. Professors make mistakes grading exams all the time, I have had it happen plenty of times, but usually the mistakes they make are at the expense of 5 points, at most. When this is the case, I normally do not fish for points if I know that doing so will not change my final grade for the better.</p>
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<p>There are certainly some schools that treat it like this, and it is a real shame. Those generally are not the top schools though. If you go to most of the top schools and look at the curriculum and expectations, they aren’t all that different from those of hard sciences like physics. At those schools, engineering is essentially just a more applied version of a hard science.</p>
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<p>That depends entirely on what your eventual job ends up being (and because of that, on which branch of engineering you are in). Some positions require not necessarily a solution done a certain way, but presented in a certain way. Those are positions like aibarr has in civil engineering. Any position where you have to pass your solutions directly to the labor who don’t have any sort of engineering training will require you to adhere to the established norms for how you present your solutions, not how you arrive at them. This seems to apply to many civil engineers and mechanical, industrial and chemical engineers who work in factories or as process engineers to name a few. That is understandable though because the point of these engineering positions is to interface with the workers to get products made, and you can’t expect those workers to know hyperbolic functions or integrals or stress/strain curves or any other engineering or higher math topic. Generally, they have algebra under their belt. That’s about it. You have to keep that in mind.</p>
<p>That said, there are a whole class of other engineering jobs where it isn’t as important how you present your solutions. You may annoy people if you do it in ways that no one understands, but as long as you show that it still works, then you are generally fine. Shoot, most of those kinds of positions encourage innovation. As an engineer, though, it is simply always important to keep the end-user in mind since ultimately they have to apply the solution you arrive at.</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, I don’t think any of that is relevant to the OP’s complaint since that seemed like a problem purely to determine one’s understanding of the Laplace transform. In that case, as I have stated before, I take the OP’s side mostly. I don’t think it is unreasonable for him to be expecting full or nearly full credit for getting a mathematically correct answer in this case. I do think various assessments he has made since the original post have been off base, particularly in regards to how to properly make an exam.</p>
<p>I think aibarr’s post #67 gives great advice. It explains a type of professionalism in engineering that is not required of scientists, at least in some fields.</p>
<p>I think that there are differences in temperament among people, and some temperaments make it easier to work as an engineer than others. This is not a question of superiority of one temperament-type over another, but just a question of selecting a career where you fit naturally–or else wanting the career so much that you are willing to go against your natural grain, and continue that when the stakes get higher, as you take on more responsibility.</p>
<p>I looked at an old calculator of mine that I grabbed at random. It has a button sequence marked for e^x, but nothing for sinh x or cosh x. One of the other calculators around here might have sinh x and cosh x.</p>
<p>This is not to say that the professor is right. However, I think the responses on this thread indicate that there is much more support for the professor than I would have anticipated. Extrapolating, it seems that you are likely to run into this in the future. If you can adopt the attitude that it’s situating you properly for you future employment, you are good to go.</p>
<p>On the other hand, maybe you should think seriously about switching to a science major, eurekameh.</p>
<p>I feel for the OP. Dropping a full letter grade for this doesn’t seem fair. If anything, I would think engineering should be about attaining the maximum level of precision given the constraints. Since he was given no constraints in how to solve the problem, and got it correct, it seems to me he deserves at least some credit. In the real world if you had any question as to whether there was such a constraint you would make sure you got that speced up front. IME having clear definitions of the problem requirements is no less important to engineers than to scientists. If I was given a problem by a customer and produced the correct answer, and he didn’t want to pay me because I didn’t do it the way he wanted, he would likely find himself in court. So he better spell that out fairly clearly in our contract.</p>
<p>But it’s an interesting debate aside from the real life ramifications for the OP. Does it matter if this was in a math class or a control theory class? Maybe. But IMO, this is sort of a stupid question for a control theory class. A much better question would be to, say, show a block diagram of a system, ask for the transfer function, then ask for poles and zeros and maybe a brief discussion of frequency and phase response and stability, and finally ask for the inverse transform. To me, that’s more of an engineering question – that’s how I remember them.</p>
<p>But I can also see the “process” argument a bit. Suppose you’re taking a class in numerical methods. They give you a simple differential equation for which you could easily provide a closed form solution. Technically, the closed form solution is “more” correct than say a Runge Kutta generated solution. Again, in the real world I would take an exact solution over an approximation, given all other factors like cost, etc are equal. But OTOH if you had just spent several weeks discussing Runga Kutta I guess they could reasonably expect you to use that method. Because you are learning something important, and since most real life problems don’t lend themselves to closed form solutions. I still think they need to explicitly say so in an exam, and I’m sure that 99% of the time they do.</p>
<p>Anyway, I understand the OPs disappointment and think he (or she) has a reasonable attitude.</p>
<h1>71 was cross-posted with boneh3ad, but I am happy to agree that really good engineers are innovators, and that the education at the top engineering schools tends to prepare them to work that way. A random professor might be an outlier–this is why I suggested that eurekameh figure out whether the prof was representative of the whole department or not.</h1>
<p>There is still the translation issue mentioned by both airbarr and boneh3ad, of course. </p>
<p>When I was MIT as a post-doc (not in an engineering field), I went to a few seminars in engineering on topics of interest to me. They were essentially indistinguishable from the seminars I attended my own department.</p>
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I do not entirely agree with this, but I do agree that you should not have been punished so severely.</p>
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If this is the greatest injustice you have yet experienced then you are truly blessed. Gird your loins - it will get worse.</p>
<p>Because process is sometimes more important than outcome in engineering.</p>
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<p>Tell that to the guys on the Tacoma Narrows bridge. Seriously, this is a really dumb statement.</p>
<p>Lots of good stuff since my response, regarding my use of “harass” and the OP’s apparent concern, I was just using the term he had used in a previous post </p>
<p>“I mean, if you’re a professor, you should EXPECT to be harassed and not have any say about it.”</p>
<p>I really would disagree with that attitude at any level of schooling.</p>
<p>I am surprised by all the defense of the professor. I suspect the prof didn’t even “get” what the student did. The student (OP) showed real creativity rather than parrot-like behavior and should be applauded for creatively arriving at a perfectly correct answer. Completing the square when a factorization is not obvious is awesome. And hyperbolic functions are well understood linear combinations of exponential functions. In fact they are built to have simplifying properties (symmetry) that exponential functions otherwise lack. “Simplify” is a subjective term. What’s simpler, 4! or 24? 2^10 or 1024? cosh(3) or (exp(3)+exp(-3))/2? The professor is in error here and has to be big enough to admit it and to reward the student. Anything else is immature and reflects poorly on the education process not to mention the department and the school. The narrowness and stubbornness of the prof is disappointing to say the least.</p>
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From the OP:
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<p>In my eyes, the professor may or may not be in the right here. It depends on how much of a nuisance the student in question was. If this is any indication, the professor may have been justified in his action.</p>
<p>I have to admit I probably couldn’t have arrived at a correct answer using your method. I quickly jotted down the problem and assuming I didn’t mess up my PFE I got (1/2e-3t)-(2e-2t)+(3/2e-t). I’m curious what your answer was. Granted, its been 30 years since I worked a problem like this so I may be wrong (especially my constants) but if I can even make a shot at this it must be a pretty trivial problem if you recognize the factorization.</p>