Berkeley's Grade "Deflation" Is A Myth?

mathboy98
Sat, 24 Apr 2010 20:31:41 +0000

least I’m getting an engineering degree because I am interested in all of the material and I’m extremely interested in all of the possible paths I can go into with that knowledge. You may not apply all of the concepts, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn them. For example, I wouldn’t not take Quantum Mechanics, even if I don’t pursue research in quantum computing.



I think what Sakky means is that you should have a choice whether you want to understand the overly theoretical stuff.

Sakky, my impression is this is probably a bigger problem in some varieties of engineering than others, since honestly folks I know seem to be getting by without having to take classes like that, but I only know folks in a certain subset of the engineering majors. I think the theory is important to be taught, because if not the majority of practicing engineers, theory is still something some will end up using, but it needn’t be forced on everyone in a field like engineering.

I think some basic derivations that teach conceptual understanding of things that are important to actual engineering are important, and this includes some physics, but certainly not crazy amounts of theory, which frankly, as a mathematician, I can say a lot of folks in engineering will be unable to understand without more sophisticated mathematics. I.e. I particularly agree with



ou don’t know what you’re actually calculating. You don’t know why you’re calculating it. And you don’t have time to find out. All you know is that you either need to do the mathematics, or you fail the class.



Unfortunately, the physics and mathematics needed to understand certain things is vastly beyond the scope of an engineering class, and I agree that manipulating symbols is a foolish thing to emphasize.