<p>*Amenah Ibrahim vividly remembers her first introduction to thermodynamics. It was her freshman year at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and she sat in a large auditorium filled with students aspiring to degrees in chemical engineering.</p>
<p>“The first thing the (professor) told us was, ‘You should expect to see this class dwindle down as the semester goes on.’ It was the first thing they told us,” she said.</p>
<p>Ibrahim said the professor’s expectation came true. As the semester progressed, students began to drop the class, some switching to other majors entirely.</p>
<p>… students in science, math and engineering take longer to complete their degrees than students who start out majoring in other fields. The study tracked thousands of students who entered college for the first time in 2004.</p>
<p>…Low graduation rates among science and math undergraduates affect how the United States competes globally. Fewer biology and math majors means fewer doctors and engineers later. </p>
<p>…Science and math programs are designed and taught to winnow down the number of students. University tenure systems often reward professors who conduct research and publish their work, but not those who teach well.</p>
<p>Among students who majored in liberal arts, business or other fields, 73% of white students and about 63% of black and Latino students finished their degrees in five years.</p>
<p>Forty-one percent of American students who start off majoring in science, math, engineering or technology fields graduate from those programs within six years.</p>
<p>…Ibrahim, the University of Illinois student, said her classes were all “sink or swim.”</p>
<p>“There were not a lot of resources to develop interest in students,” Ibrahim said. (Professors) say, ‘Here’s the workload, if you can handle it, you’re good to go. If not, sorry.’ "</p>
<p>…Schools admit more science majors than they expect to graduate, and don’t teach students to support each other, Hrabowski said, instead fostering an atmosphere of cutthroat competition…</p>
<p>That said, I went to a community college in California, and I honestly believe that not only did I save a crapload of money, but the smaller class sizes and the instructor enthusiasm greatly contributed to my success in my lower-division classes. My CC professors were not bogged down in research, so they could devote all their energy towards instruction.</p>
<p>I honestly think the CC route is the way to go for future engineers. Many of my fellow graduating seniors here at UC Davis say that, although they did okay in their lower-division science courses gradewise, they feel they didn’t learn the material that well.</p>
<p>I think its mostly that these schools present the courses as “weeders” and it doesn’t matter if the students learn anything. if you can pass it good, if you cant, sorry. The profs for those kind of courses usually either don’t have the interpersonal skills to teach or command of the language or both and to students they just might think that its easier to just go into something else so that they wont have to put up with that bs. Its really saddening that students just give up. There are some students (like myself) who refuse to and just see it as another stepping stone</p>
<p>What support should be provided? At my school, there were office hours offered for each class and free tutoring provided for almost all classes - I took advantage of both and later helped to provide both. Most students either didn’t take advantage of them or in doing do betrayed problems not solvable in either format - for example, the students who complained about lacking sufficient time to finish the assignment immediately after boasting of the football game and parties attended the weekend between assignment posting and assignment due date.</p>
<p>I was asked to represent the students of my department on certain faculty committees - one of them was specifically tasked with addressing this very problem - the declining number of students entering and the even faster decline in students graduating. We came up with no real solutions - lowering standards did not sit well with anyone, tutoring and other academic support systems were advertised but still underused, and many other factors were just not under our control.</p>
<p>So what support should be provided?</p>
<p>One quick note: while it is true that many courses serve as “weeders” this is not entirely a bad thing. The ideal is to graduate as many competent students as possible, and to get those who WON’T graduate out of the program as soon as possible so that they can pursue a different major with minimal delay. You might argue that they go too far, but I am not sure that this is born out by the studies.</p>
<p>"Who said anything about lowering expectations? Instead, why not provide engineering students with better support? </p>
<p>Would somebody like to provide the counterargument as to why engineering schools should not provide better support?"</p>
<p>Because the drop rate for engineering majors at my school is higher than any other majors, we get amazing support. I didn’t even realize when going into the school, but I almost feel pampered compared to other majors. We get free tutors, lots of free utilities, lots of teacher support. </p>
<p>And I’m absolutely certain we’re still going to have the highest drop rate. I couldn’t count on both hands the amount of kids I can tell for certain will drop this major, within just my introduction to engineering course.</p>
<p>More support at other schools would be great, but that doesn’t change everything. For everyone to pass, you need to lower the bar. And thats worse than everyone dropping.</p>
<p>I find the whole concept of labeling them “weeder” classes a little odd. Sure most people have to take them and they tend to be hard, but if you’re going into engineering you’re going to need to know calculus and physics, and I doubt they’re harder than your major courses. I think its more that those are the classes when people realize they won’t make it any further and drop, not because they weed students out any more than any other engineering classes.</p>
<p>*Eliminate engineering requirements that few (if any) students need to know as part of their undergraduate engineering studies, particularly if those requirements are currently incorporated into weeders.</p>
<p>One clear example would be the [Maxwell’s</a> Relations](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell_relations]Maxwell’s”>Maxwell relations - Wikipedia)from thermodynamics. To this day, I have yet to find a single engineer outside of academia who actually ever uses them. Heck, even most engineers within academia never touch them. So why are undergrads forced to learn them? Even more saliently, why are undergrads weeded out vigorously if they don’t learn them well? If you need to weed students out, fine, weed them out via a skillset that they actually need to know. </p>
<p>On a larger scale, stop requiring students to perform complex, long-handed derivations of fundamental engineering equations by hand, starting from first principles as part of exams. Nobody actually goes around deriving pages and pages worth of equations by hand on the actual engineering job. Heck, most practicing engineers barely remember any calculus/diffeq/linear-algebra at all. When engineers need an equation, they’ll pull it from a manual. They’re certainly not going to derive it by hand. So why weed students out who can’t perform a task that they don’t really need to know on the job anyway? </p>
<p>I remember one guy who worked one summer as an engineering intern at an R&D site. One of the other engineers at the site actually asked him for help to prepare so that he could understand his daughter’s high school calculus homework, because that intern was the only guy in the whole site, including some with even PhD engineering degrees, who actually knew how to do basic calculus, such as how to take the derivative of trigonometric functions. Now, obviously all of those engineers knew calculus when they were in school. But they simply hadn’t used it in years, sometimes decades. And keep in mind, this is an R&D site we’re talking about here. Engineers in industry simply don’t use calculus.</p>
<p>Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m certainly not proposing that no students should ever learn that material. Those students who want to learn the derivations of Maxwell’s Relations, perhaps because they intend to enter academia, would be free to take an optional elective course. But why should those who just want to earn a bachelor’s degree and enter the workforce as regular engineers be required to learn what they don’t need to know, on pain of having their academic records trashed and weeded out if they don’t? </p>
<p>I have nothing against rigor and standards for competence. What I oppose is irrelevant and mis-aimed rigor. You should be rigorous about and demand competence regarding skills that are actually relevant for the job, not about extraneous tasks that practically nobody uses. It is precisely that sort of weeding about irrelevant skills - and that the savvier students know is irrelevant - that engenders cynicism amongst the students. Many students know that this is just a silly busy-work game that they are being forced to play, but one with painful consequences should they lose. </p>
<p>*Allow students to leave engineering with a clean slate.</p>
<p>Right now, plenty of highly capable students don’t dare to even try engineering, because they fear the harsh grading. Those students should be allowed expunge their poor engineering grades expunged should they decide to leave engineering. Why not? They’re not going to major in engineering anyway, so who cares what their engineering grades were? </p>
<p>I remember one guy who had an outside scholarship that provided him with a full ride + stipend as long as he maintained a certain GPA (which I believe was a 3.0). But that GPA requirement deterred him from even trying engineering, because he would not dare to risk his scholarship, instead choosing an easier major. If his GPA had dipped below the threshold, the scholarship committee wouldn’t have cared that engineering courses are graded far more harshly than most other majors. All they would have seen is that he no longer met the requirements of the scholarship. He might have become a stellar engineer. We’ll never know because he never dared to try, because the engineering curves frightened him away. If he had the option of leaving engineering and dropping all of his engineering grades at any time, he might have actually tried out the engineering major. </p>
<p>*Don’t even assign non-passing engineering grades at all.</p>
<p>For those students who earn less than a C (which is usually the minimum necessary to pass) in an engineering class, why assign a punitive non-passing grade? Why not just simply pretend that the student had never taken the class at all? Note, if the class is required to graduate, he would still have to take the class again (which he would also had to do anyway had he earned a non-passing grade). But I don’t see what purpose is accomplished by assigning him a nonpassing grade. </p>
<p>Similarly, those students with C’s who want to repeat the class in hopes of a stronger grade should be allowed to do that if they wish, and if they do, the old C should be expunged from his record. Again, why not? If the guy demonstrates far stronger command of the material the second time around, who cares what happened the first time?</p>
<p>*Learn from Olin</p>
<p>The more I learn about Olin, the more impressed I am. An engineering school that actually made the Princeton Review’s top 20 in categories of “Happy students”, and "Best overall experience for undergraduate, where the performance of engineering-focused schools tend to be subpar. </p>
<p>Heck, one could even learn from MIT who, while obviously still infamously rigorous, implements policies to protect the futures of its students. The sophomore ‘exploratory’ grading option - which is effectively a retroactive drop - allows students to attempt difficult courses without fear of poor grades. Failed courses in the freshman year are recorded only on the student’s internal transcript which is only available to the MIT administration (and hence is never revealed to outside parties, including grad schools and employers, without an explicit student waiver). I personally think that MIT doesn’t go far enough, but they provide far more than what most other engineering programs do. </p>
<p>*And perhaps most controversially of all: lower the grading of the other majors. </p>
<p>Without a doubt, one of the most demoralizing features of any engineering program is to watch your non-engineering colleagues enjoy the dream college experience that you wish you could have, while also earning better grades than you have. Comforting yourself with the notion that you will have a more marketable degree than them eventually loses its effectiveness, particularly once you watch them heading to top law/med schools or landing high paid consulting/finance jobs because of their (effortlessly earned) higher grades. Ultimately, that needs to stop, and grading equity needs to be imposed across all majors, although I recognize that this is a giant project that will likely take decades to accomplish, if it ever will be. </p>
<p>One thing that engineering programs could do now is provide an ‘equitable’ transcript, where all engineering grades are automatically ‘improved’ by a certain ‘equity’ coefficient, the value of which would be derived from a statistical model based on the grades of prior students that could answer the question of how much higher would a particular engineering student’s GPA likely would have been had he majored in something other than engineering. Such an ‘equity’ transcript would then be the transcript that the student could send to AMCAS, LSDAS, the Rhodes/Marshall Scholarship committees, or other such organizations where engineering students are competing against non-engineers and would therefore be handicapped by lower engineering grading standards. {For those who find this proposal controversial, I personally don’t find this to be any more so than the notion of MIT maintaining two sets of transcripts - internal and external - with the former but not the latter including information regarding failed freshman courses, and the latter being the transcript that is sent out to employers and grad schools.} </p>
<p>Another idea would be, on each transcript, along with each of the student’s course grade, also include the average grade of assigned in that course. Then, alongside the student’s overall GPA, also include the ‘comparison’ GPA which would be the GPA of the hypothetical student who took every single course that that student did, and earned the average grade of that course every time. Then, grad schools and employers would be less impressed with somebody earning an A in a course where the average grade was an A-minus, and more impressed with somebody earning a B in a class where the average was a C. {I believe Dartmouth has implemented such a process now.} A 3.5 overall GPA would look far less impressive if you always took easy courses such that the hypothetical student earned a 3.7 GPA.</p>
<p>That’s the wrong question. The better question is if a weak support system is the issue. Instead, I would argue that engineering requires a level of analytical and logical thinking that is not suited to everyone.</p>
<p>By the way, if you reply with a 30 page thesis on the issue, I’m not going to read it. Brevity is an important component of effective writing.</p>
<p>Yes, short answers are helpful! One time Abraham Lincoln gave a speech and started (I’m paraphrasing, because I don’t have the exact quote), “I apologize that this speech will be so long. If I’d had more time to prepare, it would have been shorter.”</p>
<p>sakky, pretty much everything you suggest is highly impractical. I don’t necessarily disagree with things like erasing engineering grades if you transfer out. I especially think the way MIT operates their grading system is quite nice and helps keep people from being demoralized early by giving them a bit of time to get into the swing of engineering. Pretty much everything else you said is impractical.</p>
<p>I, for one, especially oppose the idea of getting rid of derivations from first principles. Yes, you will likely never use that in industry, but in my opinion, you need to have a strong fundamental background and know where the concepts come from if you truly want to be the best engineer you can be. Not expressly using something is not an excuse to not learn it. I am a lot more comfortable working with people who understand the basics well because they are the ones who are a lot less likely to screw up by applying some higher concept incorrectly, even if they don’t quite remember all the calculus involved anymore. I can’t really say the same about Maxwell’s principles. At UIUC in the MechSE department, they didn’t even teach them until higher classes as far as I can remember. The Ph.D.-level guys you mentioned as not knowing calculus seems a little far-fetched to me - at least in terms of my own experience with Ph.D.-level engineering work. Either these guys came from incompetent programs, were just simply incompetent themselves, or your guy that you remembered was exaggerating.</p>
<p>Trying to even out the grading scale is a noble proposition, but it just would never work. Aside from the huge administrative inertia in trying to do it, there is the problem that different areas of study have entirely different metrics by which success is measured. If the bar for being a competent English major is reading and analyzing all Vonnegut books or something, you can’t just start handing out lower grades to people who have met that bar just because the engineering bar is comparatively higher.</p>
<p>If you ask me, it starts in middle school and high school where most math and science teachers I ever had were anywhere from woefully incompetent to just okay. You have kids learning the very basics of algebra from people who barely know it themselves and you end up with a bunch of kids who hate algebra because they don’t think it connects to anything in the real world and it just snowballs from there. Sure the huge universities could do a better job of pimping their support system (since most of them already have a huge, underutilized one in place) but if the students simply aren’t prepared and are just coming in for the steady paycheck, they are doomed to failure anyway. It is better to get them engaged early so they will have more of their own motivation to get that help if/when needed.</p>
<p>The idea of the transcript with the GPA multiplier is quite frankly terrible, but the second idea about including average course grades is pretty good. One thing to note is that most engineering grad schools don’t look at GPA as the overwhelming primary indicator for admission. I realize that medical schools and law schools do, but engineering schools care far more about other things. Good research experience and professor recommendations will go a long way to make up for your 3.3 GPA to an admissions committee, for example. After all, the name of the game in engineering academia is research output, and to be good at that, you need more than just a high GPA.</p>
<p>You like this example, but only a minority of engineering students take an advanced thermodynamics course that may include Maxwell’s Relations. It is not in the freshman / sophomore physics sequence that all engineering students take.</p>
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<p>Someone who has learned the derivation and basic principles behind an equation is much more likely to (a) be able to relearn it quickly if needed, even if it is not “off the top of one’s head”, (b) notice instances where it may be applicable, and (c) notice whether it is being applied correctly.</p>
<p>I just finished my freshman year at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and we have what we call a “engineering fundamentals program” aka EF. All engineering students, exempting computer science majors, must take EF-151, EF-105 (matlab and excell), and EF-152. </p>
<p>In these courses they teach all the fundamental physics that an engineer might run into, and they do this in a large lecture setting of 100+ students, but right after lecture, you go to a recitation were you break into smaller groups of around 30 and you are assigned a table with 3 other people that you must work with during the recitation were a TA goes over the material you learned in lecture via experimentation.</p>
<p>So in a sense, they make you learn to work together in group settings, as the recitation problems that are assigned are normally quite tricky! Now, after you finish your classes for the day, you go back to your dorm, which the entire floor is occupied by other freshmen engineering majors! </p>
<p>You start on your 3 hours worth of EF homework you were assigned that cement the problems and techniques into your mind. The professors expect you to help each other out with homework, and in fact, the homework %20 of your grade and is done online and is grades leniently, because they want you to do your home work and learn by trial and error!</p>
<p>For student support, we have help sessions several times a week were a student who is did very well in the class is paid to help students who are having trouble on their homework or preparing for an exam. We also have an online discussion board for the homework which is monitored by the TA’s and professors who give hints to students that are stuck working a problem.</p>
<p>The way we do things here, really breeds a strong sense of community amongst the engineering majors. We tend to stick pretty tightly together for the most part!</p>
<p>Alas, it is included in notorious weeders, such as Berkeley’s Chemical Engineering 141. I suspect that a similar requirement exists for most other chemical engineering programs. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: how many actual chemical engineers in industry (as opposed to academia) actually make extensive use of the Maxwell’s Relations on the job? Heck, how many have used it even once? </p>
<p>Chemical engineering programs ought to stop weeding people via the Maxwell’s Relations forthwith. </p>
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<p>Trust me, it was no exaggeration. Keep in mind that most PhD settings - at least in industry - are R&D sites, as was the case with this particular intern. Employees at R&D sites generally spend their time running experiments, or in some cases, pilot processes (as was the case with this intern). People are therefore simply interested in conducting and reporting the results of experimental results. Not deriving pages and pages worth of equations. That’s why nobody remembers how to derive anything. </p>
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<p>Then let me posit the following analogy. How many engineers actually take a course on Real Analysis - which is often times one of the true ‘weeder’ course for math majors and which mathematicians will tell you is where you would learn how calculus truly operates at its most fundamental and rigorous level (as opposed to the fast-and-loose ‘toy’ calculus that is taught in lower division math courses)? Real Analysis is where you finally learn how what the concepts of limits, differentiation, integration, continuity, and the fundamental theorem of calculus (which intimately binds integration and differentiation together) truly mean.</p>
<p>The answer seems to be ‘practically none’. Few if any engineers actually take the Real Analysis math course, and certainly few are required to do so. Heck, physics - by far the most quantitatively rigorous of all of the sciences - usually does not require that undergraduates take the Real Analysis course (although many do anyway). </p>
<p>The rationale is simple - as an engineer, you don’t really need to know that. Engineering programs have (wisely) decided that their students don’t really need to know how to rigorously prove the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus or the Mean Value Theorem. Engineers simply use calculus as a tool, without knowing or caring about why those tools work. Let the mathematicians worry about why those tools work. </p>
<p>And the same can (and should) be said for most engineering formulae. Just as I don’t really care how/why a derivative/integral rigorously works, I frankly also don’t really care why an engineering equation truly works. I care far more about what you can do with those tools. Those rare engineers who actually truly do care about why calculus truly works are perfectly free to join the math majors in their Real Analysis course. Similarly, those rare engineers who actually care about deriving engineering equations from first principles can take an optional elective course designed just for them. </p>
<p>So here’s an open question: if engineers need to know “basic principles behind [calculus] equations”, then why not force all engineers to take Real Analysis? Then they would really know all of the basic principles behind calculus equations, right? </p>
<p>Yet the fact remains that I have yet to meet a single engineer outside of academia who has ever studied Real Analysis. </p>
<p>Now, don’t get me wrong. I readily agree that engineers need to know fundamental principles. The issue then is what exactly are those fundamental principles? What I take to be a fundamental principle for an engineer is actually knowing how to build something practical, and in generally understanding the function and development of other practical devices he sees around them… For example, a chemical engineer should actually know how to build, say, a real-life, working battery or perhaps a home microbrewery. Note, obviously it wouldn’t be a highly efficient battery or microbrewery in the world. But he should be able to build a functioning device. Similarly, he should be able to know and explain in a general sense how the chemical engineering products that he interacts with every day - i.e. plastic, steel, paper, glass, processed food, dyes, concrete, etc. - are actually built. Electrical engineers should understand how real-world electronic devices actually work. {I will always remember the farcical episode where a couple of electrical engineering students called me to help them connect their home A/V & networking system because they couldn’t figure out how to do it themselves. Granted, it was a nontrivial setup as they wanted to connect not only a regular TV/DVD/satellite set-top-box, but also several gaming consoles, surround sound, a homemade DVR, and their own laptops through wireless. But still, these were top electrical engineering students, so you think they would know how to do it themselves.} </p>
<p>But they don’t learn that. They don’t, because they’re instead spending time deriving equations all day long, to the neglect of practical skills. Those practical skills are what I consider to be the true ‘fundamental knowledge’ that actual engineers outside of academia actually need. </p>
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<p>Why not? The key issue is to determine what is meant by ‘competent’. I think we can all agree that somebody with a 2.1 GPA in a creampuff major was probably not very competent. But he nevertheless passes and is granted a degree. Should he really be granted a degree? {This is why I think that the threshold for graduation for the creampuff majors should be increased to, say, 2.5 or even a 3.0 in some cases. I think we can all agree that a student with a 2.1 in a creampuff major basically did and learned nothing and probably doesn’t deserve a degree.} </p>
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<p>Why? There’s a certain engineering school in Palo Alto that essentially does that now. That school is widely noted to be amongst the most relaxed of the top-ranked engineering programs in the world when it comes to grading standards. Their engineering students - along with the rest of their students - are effectively enjoying a transcript GPA ‘multiplier’ that their counterparts at peer schools such as MIT or Caltech, do not enjoy. Nevertheless, their students do not seem to suffer any handicap in the workforce or in academia. Indeed, they thrive.</p>
<p>Stanford is living proof that you don’t really need harshly punitive grading standards to produce excellent graduates. While earning A’s is obviously still quite difficult, you’re almost certainly not going to flunk out either. Not so long ago, the F grade wasn’t even handed out, and even today, the F grade is so rare as to be a chimera. </p>
<p>So here’s an open question: exactly how does Stanford succeed with its relatively relaxed engineering grading standards? </p>
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<p>Fine, then don’t read it. Nobody is asking you to read it. Let the people who want to read it be allowed to do so. </p>
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<p>I disagree. In practically session of EE40, a large fraction - perhaps up to half - of the students dropped the class, almost certainly because they feared getting a terrible final grade if they stayed. {I doubt that many people who were earning A’s would drop the class.} What happened to those students in the final grade distribution? What we should see is a large contingent of ‘drops’ or ‘no grade recorded’ - many of which would have surely been D’s or F’s if those students had stayed in the course. Instead, all we see a truncated grade distribution, clearly heavily skewed by self-selection.</p>
<p>My son is at Purdue, finishing his junior year. There were tough days in his beginning years of mechanical engineering- math and science that he just couldn’t get his head around from the prof or the TA or going in for office hours. We told him he’s going to get a grade in that class, find someone who can help you whether we pay them or a friend or whatever. He did and survived those classes. I can’t say it’s easy- a lot of them were curved so he’d think he was getting a horrible grade and it ended up a B. He’s loved the real life engineering as he has a co-op and his words from day 1 of the co-op has been, now I understand why I take the classes I do and the classes are so much better when you understand the real life applications.
I didn’t want him at a big school, I think some of the ones that “pamper you” as someone stated, would have made it easier for him to excel. However, this is his journey, he loves Purdue and he has been highly successful in his co-ops</p>
<p>That’s exactly my point. Why do engineering programs seemingly refuse to teach real-life applications from the very beginning? For example, an actual real-life application of the Maxwell’s Relations - if one indeed truly exists (and I am still searching for one to this very day) - would have gone a long way towards motivating the students to actually learn them. As it stands now, the Maxwell Relations are viewed by students as cynical busywork that schools force them to learn simply as a weeding mechanism but with no practical utility. It is viewed as parcel to a chronological retributive hazing process: professors were forced to undergo the painful process of learning useless equations when they were students, so now they’re going to force current students to undergo the same painful and useless process. </p>
<p>For those who would disagree with that characterization, then by all means, show me how the M.R.'s would actually be useful. Show me when and where actual real-world engineers (outside of academia) would actually use the M.R.'s on their daily jobs.</p>
<p>“For those who would disagree with that characterization, then by all means, show me how the M.R.'s would actually be useful. Show me when and where actual real-world engineers (outside of academia) would actually use the M.R.'s on their daily jobs.”</p>
<p>Producing future engineers with capability, determination, the ability to think logically and surpass hardship?</p>
<p>My thermodynamics textbook only spends 5 pages on Maxwell Relations, two of which contain an example problem. I think we only spent about one week on deriving thermo-fluid properties, and the bulk of my thermodynamic experience was to look up the values in tables.</p>
<p>The first quarter of the thermodynamics curriculum at UC Davis consisted of applications of thermodynamics to turbines, pumps, and heat exchangers. We talked about power cycles, and refrigeration cycles. It was about as applied as you can get.</p>
<p>Surely you can do that via a task that is actually useful, no? </p>
<p>How’s this for a possibility. Instead of a course mandating the study of M.R’s, have a course where the chemical engineering students build the best working battery they possibly can. This is a highly practical and marketable skill, as a breakthrough innovation in battery technology would utterly revolutionize at least two industries - the auto industry (imagine a truly cheap yet energy efficient electric car) and the computer/IT/telecom industry (imagine a smartphone/laptop/tablet that could operate for weeks or even months at a time without need for recharge) - and probably many more industries besides. I could one day envision the aerospace industry being revolutionized by fully electric turbines. A battery breakthrough would unlock a vast array of technological and even political/sociological possibilities. (Imagine no more political/military conflicts over oil and no more oil spills that wreak havoc on the environment.} </p>
<p>Now obviously an undergraduate engineering class is highly unlikely to produce a battery technological breakthrough. But at least the students will have learned something practical about how real-world batteries truly work and how to build one of their own, even if not an efficient one. </p>