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<p>One of the saddest and most inefficient practices I’ve seen in engineering programs is to weed people out via topics that they don’t actually need to know to do the job. If you’re going to flunk people out of the program, it should be because they failed to understand how to perform tasks that engineers actually need to know for the job. If an EE student can’t understand basic circuit analysis, or a chemical engineering student can’t understand a simple process flow diagram, then fine, kick him out. But who really cares if a ChemE student can’t, say, actually derive out the Maxwell Relations from thermodynamic first principles? Nobody actually does that on the job.</p>