Berkeley's Grade "Deflation" Is A Myth?

sakky
Sat, 24 Apr 2010 12:08:47 +0000

I don’t think that’s as obvious as you think. Course exams don’t exist to test your abilities in the career you think you’ll have, because college isn’t simply a glorified trade school. The idea is that you like to learn things, regardless of whether or not you will go on to directly use them in your job.



Yet what you learn ought to have some correlation with what you may be doing on the job. Keep in mind that we are talking about engineering degrees, which are supposed to be professional degrees, and (with the exception of BioE at Berkeley) are ABET-certified programs, the implication of which is that - as sentimentGX4 stated - you may indeed be confronted on the job with a hazardous situation in which you ought to know what you’re doing. Yet engineering exams often times devolves into little more than a glorified game of speed-chess, but with equations instead of knights and bishops. Again, nobody actually goes around frantically deriving long sequences of equations on the actual job.

One serious problem this entails is that the program selects the wrong people. Many people who might otherwise be perfectly capable engineers are excluded from the program simply because they can’t do fast math - a skill that you don’t really need to do the job. Conversely, what you do have are ‘engineers’ who are little more than applied math majors. Engineering knowledge should be measured on whether you can build and design technical products, not whether you can simply solve math.



And if the professor constructs an exam where the person who did an average job learning will get 50%, what is wrong with that?



The problem is that it prepares you poorly for the actual job. Engineering students are inculcated in a system where mistakes are not only tolerated, but actually inevitable - many (probably most) engineering students having never even once scored 100% on any of their engineering exams - to a workplace where even one mistake could be dangerous. That’s a significant culture shock that few engineering students are properly prepared for.

But the more pernicious problem is that it fosters a sense of cynicism and despair. When you know that even the best students are still going to make significant mistakes on wide swaths of any given exam, and you will earn a top grade simply by making fewer mistakes than most others even if that still means making plenty of mistakes, then the system degenerates into a silly game of point scoring. Students inevitably realize that what they need to do to score maximum exam points have nothing to do with the actual engineering job, and the only goal is simply to survive.