Berkeley's Grade "Deflation" Is A Myth?

sakky
Sun, 25 Apr 2010 04:14:03 +0000

I agree mostly with you regarding the exams (keeping in mind I haven’t started at Berkeley engineering yet, and I really get a kick out of difficult exams).



Perhaps because you’ve done well on them, and presumably will continue to do so. But what about those students who don’t do well on them? In particular, what about those students who perform poorly on the exams, but could still be perfectly competent engineers? The system forces out people because they don’t know things that, frankly, they don’t actually need to know to do the job. As a case in point, if you don’t know how to calculate and derive the Maxwell Relations, you will surely fail the required thermodynamics course, despite the fact that I have never once met a single engineer outside of academia that actually uses the Maxwell Relations on the job.

Keep in mind that I am hardly ‘soft’ on the matter of stringency of the discipline. I agree that certain material needs to be imparted, and those students who cannot understand that material should not be allowed to graduate with engineering degrees (or, better yet, should never have been admitted to the engineering programs in the first place). But that material should regard topics that working engineers actually use.



You don’t get an engineering degree so that right when you graduate you have all of the knowledge to do a job.



Nobody is advocating that you can ever have all of the knowledge to do the job immediately upon graduation. But you should still know some of it as part of your required courses, and those required courses should not include material that you don’t really need to know for the actual job. See below.



At 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.

So, what I’m trying to say is that I’d definitely want to preserve the balance of theoretical and practical. I agree that practicality is a lot of what engineering is about, but without the theoretical side it wouldn’t be nearly as enjoyable, imo.

Sorry I just really dislike the idea of learning to get a job. I can’t imagine wanting to go to college to get a job. I’m going to college because I want to learn about things I’m passionate about, and I will go into a career that interests me, definitely not so I can get a good job, so that I can have lots of money, etc…



Yet you have to admit that many (probably most) engineering students are majoring in engineering in order to have a job. Surely we would all agree that if engineering majors did not garner such relatively high starting salaries, far fewer students would major in engineering.

Hence, I have always advocated an approach with far greater flexibility regarding electives and relatively few required courses. Those engineering students such as yourself who want to learn deep theory - possibly as the pathway to academia - would be free to do so as part of a wide-ranging selection of electives. Those who are more practically oriented and simply want to design and build practical technologies should be free to do that as their choice of electives. The required courses would include topics that all engineers would actually find useful.

As a case in point, I agree that the practical implications of thermodynamics are indeed important for engineers to know. They should understand the Laws of Thermodynamics (especially the mystically complex 2nd Law), how an engine or heat pump actually works, and perhaps some basic information on the thermodynamics of chemical mixing and reactions. But the actual derivations from first principles could be left for the theoretical elective that students are welcome but not required to take.

We should also keep in mind that the distinguishing feature of engineering is its practicality. We already have math and physics departments. Those students who really want to learn theoretical math or physics are welcome to major in those subjects, perhaps even as part of a double with engineering. {For example, any engineering student who truly wants to learn the theoretical basis of thermodynamics should take Physics 112 where they would learn more than they ever wanted to know.} If the engineering major is simply a glorified physics or math major, then, to put it bluntly, it really has no reason to exist.