<p>According to one guy from Berkeley, the entire first midterm of his ChemE141 course required knowledge of the M.R’s, as each question (of which there were 3) either regarded a direct derivation/manipulation of M.R.'s themselves, or needed the M.R.'s as a basic step to solving the rest of the problem. Basically, if you did not understand the M.R.'s, you failed the exam. And many people did. </p>
<p>The final exam was not much better, with a large subset of questions requiring intimate knowledge of the M.R.'s. </p>
<p>Hence, my question: why? Specifically, why were the M.R.'s considered to be so important? Practically nobody in industry actually uses them, or even remembers how to use them. Or, heck, even understood them when they were forced to learn them.</p>
<p>I remember one woman who was one of the best chemical engineering graduates in her Berkeley class, and stayed at Berkeley for her PhD. (She technically went to a different department to avoid Berkeley’s silly anti-incest rule, but she continued to work under the same advisor she had done research with as an undergrad, and even kept the same lab bench, so for all practical purposes, she was earning a Berkeley ChemE PhD.} </p>
<p>She was offered the position of a TA for the thermo class, but had to decline, because she frankly admitted that she had never understood the class when she took it and hence felt uncomfortable serving as the TA. </p>
<p>Think about that. This was one of Berkeley’s star graduates, who amazingly finished her PhD in just 3 years. Yet to this day, she will admit that she never understood that thermo class and felt happy just to survive it. And, yes, she has never once ever thought about the M.R.'s ever since that class finished.</p>
<p>I cannot speak for ChemE, as I’m a MechE. Chemistry was hard, but most students were determined not to fail. The biggest weed-out class by far was Calculus, in my experience. A substantial majority of the people who failed in my Calculus class were CLEARLY not motivated to learn Calculus. The class was not curved, and the teacher encouraged us to work together. I met students who seemed defiant in not wanting to learn the material, but they wanted the grade. Then, of course, it was the professor’s fault.</p>
<p>My position is that you need to learn the theory because you MAY have to apply it in a practical setting. I honestly don’t think I learned anything in Fluid Mechanics. I bombed the final miserably – practically not knowing anything of what I was doing, but because many people bombed it worse than I did, I got a B+. I’ve only opened the Fluids book once or twice since then. Most of the time, the only Fluid Dynamics stuff I use is Fdrag=Cdrag<em>rho</em>A*V^2. I haven’t thrown my book away yet, because there may come a time when I might need it again.</p>
<p>P.S. Do I want to know what an anti-incest rule is? (It sounds disgusting…)</p>
<p>That actually leads to another issue. Many people say that engineering coursework and grading needs to be difficult because we need to enforce standards to ensure safety, as we don’t want bridges falling down or airplanes falling out of the sky. But the next logical question then is: what exactly are these ‘standards’ and are they actually being met? I would submit that, right now, those standards are not being met by many engineering students or practicing engineers, which undermines the logical premise of the necessity of those standards. </p>
<p>After all, you admitted yourself that understood practically nothing on your fluid mechanics final, but nevertheless not only passed the class but also with a quite respectable grade, simply because other students understood even less. Similarly, that girl I mentioned will admit to this very day that she understood practically nothing in her thermo class, but not only passed but got a good grade because the other students knew even less. Surely the same could be said for plenty of other engineers who are working in industry right now, who passed certain engineering classes not because they actually understood the material, but just because they managed to beat the bulk of the other students on the curve (who understood even less). I know one engineer who had never once scored above a 75% on a single one of his engineering exams, and would often times score below 50%, but still passed all his classes anyway and is now a successful engineer. Nobody seems to be worried that he’s going to design an airplane that will fall out of the sky, despite the fact that he never once earned a top (absolute) score on any of his engineering exams. </p>
<p>I know one guy who earned a 30% on an engineering exam… and celebrated. Why? Because the mean was a 25%, and the score variance was so tightly centered around 25% that a score of 30% translated into an A. I also know a guy who scored somewhere in the 80’s%, and was brought to near tears. Why? Because the mean was a 95%, and so his score basically translated into, at best, a D, and perhaps an F. </p>
<p>What that means is that there are no absolute standards in engineering when it comes to determining grading and, more importantly, who passes and fails. All that matters is your score relative to other scores. You can know practically nothing and still get an A as long as everybody else knows even less. You can know almost everything and still fail, if everybody knows even more. Grading is arbitrary, there are no absolute standards. Some people who failed would probably have passed if they had taken the class with a different (dumber) cohort. </p>
<p>Not only are grading standards arbitrary within a particular school, they are also certainly arbitrary between schools. Somebody who flunks out of engineering at Berkeley or Caltech might have passed if he had gone to a lower-ranked engineering school (heck, he might even have passed if he had gone to Stanford). Put another way, somebody who barely graduated from a lower-ranked school (or Stanford) might not have graduated from Berkeley, but since he did indeed graduate, he can now work as an engineer. He was not prohibited from becoming an engineer and therefore possibly endangering the safety of the public by designing a shoddy airplane. He met the (arbitrary) standard of the school which he attended, but that standard may have nothing to do with the standard demanded by other schools. Hence, (supposedly) unqualified engineers are entering the workforce. </p>
<p>I question the sharp discontinuity at the 2.0 GPA cutoff that determines passing and failing, or, more generally, why anybody really needs to fail out anyway. Let’s face it: somebody with a 2.1 GPA in engineering is not really doing that much better than somebody with a 1.9. Yet the former person will earn an engineering degree and be a fully qualified engineer, whereas the latter won’t earn any degree at all. Why such a dramatic difference in outcome for such a miniscule difference in performance? Just give him a degree. It doesn’t even have to necessarily be an engineering degree - you can call it a ‘bachelor’s in technology studies’ or something. But just give him something. Why do you have to toss him out the door with no degree at all?</p>
<p>I never spent that much time on Maxwell Relations in my ChemE thermo course. At most we spent half a class period talking about and never had to deal with a question about them on any exams. Personally, I don’t think that the applicability of course material is what causes people to switch out of engineering majors. I definitely think it is instead the amount of time and effort needed in engineering courses that drives people away. I have friends who were LA, business, and hard science majors. I would say that the LA and business majors I knew spent very little time on work outside of class time. The science majors I knew had a fairly easy course load as well, but I remember their exams being fairly intense. Engineering on the other hand feels like a constant struggle. There is always some project or assignment due, and when I try to take a breather after busting my a** studying for an exam I end up behind and having to play catch up. Basically, engineering is difficult. Students who don’t have the brains or the heart will end up torturing themselves if they continue and don’t switch out. I’m not surprised that this phenomenon exists.</p>
<p>That is interesting, and illustrates yet again the arbitrariness of the standards in place. Even within (ostensibly) the same major, different schools are apparently applying different criteria to determine who is weeded out and who isn’t. That results in some chemical engineers in the workforce who will know the M.R.'s well including their derivations, because they were forced to learn them on pain of failure, and many others who barely learned them at all. Put another way, those students at the former school who were weeded out because they couldn’t understand the M.R.'s probably would be practicing engineers right now had they simply gone to another school. </p>
<p>Engineering programs ought to come together to determine what exactly do students truly need to know - what the true baseline level of competence is - and weed out only those students who fail to meet that level of competence. They should stop bolting on other arbitrary, school-specific weedout standards that have nothing to do with that baseline level. Otherwise, students will rightfully treat engineering as a cynical game where they must hope to surmount silly and arbitrary obstacles that have little to do with the actual practice of engineering but just because ‘the powers that be said so’. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>*"…Duke is actually a good example of the loss of talent in science and technology that happens in college.</p>
<p>Unlike most colleges and universities, Duke’s undergraduate engineering school has a separate admissions office. Every year it has to oversubscribe its admissions because many students will leave the engineering school and transfer into arts and sciences after a year, typically majoring in the social sciences. When you ask students why they make this move, they often say it’s because of the workload and grading.</p>
<p>There is also significant attrition across college campuses when it comes to potential biology majors, typically those who initially wanted to go into medical fields. Again, the driver for this attrition is workload and grading.</p>
<p>There are those who argue that this attrition is a good thing, and I would agree to some extent. We don’t want mediocrity in the design of our bridges and machines, or in a hospital operating room. But some of this attrition is undoubtedly unnecessary.</p>
<p>I don’t want to dwell on Duke, but many of those who move out of engineering have the talent to excel. In conversations with them, I have heard a common story about seeing people in dorms partying away and wondering, “Why not me?”</p>
<p>That’s what I mean by unnecessary (and harmful) attrition. I don’t believe that the sciences and engineering should demand less of their students. Rather, the social sciences and humanities need to demand more…"*</p>
<p>Sakky: What do you think about problem-based learning (particularly in courses that are not engineering but perhaps are natural and hard sciences associated w/them)? As a person who attends Emory and has several friends at Georgia Tech (another very tough engineering school, as most should know. I was curious about a math class there, considering taking one over summer, and came across a course website for calc. 2 that presented a grade distribution. The top of the class received exactly a 50 exam average, and thus an A. Seems stupid to me), I have seen their work and exams and it seems very “rule-based”, and hardly no apps. </p>
<p>We don’t have engineering here, but it seems as if there are fundamental differences in the ways science and math courses are taught here, and that may be due to us being a much smaller private school that tries desperately to maintain high teaching quality, even in sciences. Given this, we have more professors that gravitate toward the cased-based learning and different pedagogies even at the introductory course level. This especially applies in the biological sciences. I’ve compared Tech classes in this area (as they may be relevant to my biomedical engineering friends), and for some reason ours seem to be more “intellectually” rigorous in the sense that it demanded less memorization and a more in depth understanding of difficult material in the context of complex applications. Given that, Tech students would generally have a higher out of class workload (much being mundane problems), but exams seemed to demand much less (questions how much the students were supposed to get from solving problems). For example, Tech intro. bio, all sections are multiple choice that ask very straight forward questions. Emory has a case based section each semester (admittedly, these classes are probably more rigorous than Tech counterparts, because they must prepare casework in and out of class on top of “disease of the weak” synopsis and write-ups, and then lab associated w/the course is as rigorous), where the exams introduce and force students to grapple w/novel cases in a shorter period of time. Other sections do multiple choice (some asking many applications that should probably be asked as short answer/essay questions), and others MC/short answer-essay hybrids. My physical biology class was problem based learning. My organismal form and function class was based on a data analysis approach (we would work on cases in class, discuss them, and professor would present statistical results to see if it agreed with our conjecture. Or we would start w/data, assess it, and he’d present research findings. The exam was formatted in such a way). My understanding is that most (almost all) of the Tech upperlevel courses in bio (my BME friend takes many as they are supposedly great auxiliaries to the engineering aspect) stick to a very traditional course format and generally involves traditional lecture. One may say that those classes over there are larger, but I checked and for various courses available at both, Tech is on par or smaller in size. Emory has no engineering and a huge pre-med presence, so bio classes remain a decent size. In fact, some courses are so popular that they are larger than intro. bio (enrollment per section ranges from 65-100 (a 92 student class is a case based section. Students are split into groups, and the class is discussion as opposed to lecture based. So size is but so restrictive) depending on popularity, 3 upperlevels are over 100 students). My question is kind of, is there something preventing pedagogical experimentation over there? Because size seems not to limit professors from trying new innovative teaching methods that are very effective and garner a legit. interest in science (as opposed to it being something that the students just want to "get through), and this comes from lecture track and tenured profs here. </p>
<p>I then look at courses like Organic chemistry which I expected to be hard at Tech (and they actually believe that it is). It is a complete joke to what most will experience over here. The only difference is that they are forced to do and turn in problem sets. However, those sets and the exams are so dumb and lacking of applications that they are a complete joke (I’ve seen Berkeley’s and while it is much tougher than Tech’s, I was expecting a lot more. However, not bad for a school their size). Their whole course is geared toward the final ACS final exam which is multiple choice. Their exams are not multiple choice, but might as well be because one can get by just memorizing notes. The mechanisms (very few, usually 1-2) were very basic and the synthesis was relatively simple, and the explanation questions were self-explanatory. Not only this, but the course was essentially standardized, so you couldn’t get more rigor if you wanted (my friends essentially took the same exams no matter what prof. they had). At Emory, you have profs. that truly push and make you seriously apply the material. For example, on an example, you’ll have at least 50-70/100 points based on 1 to several biological systems or research discovery. You’ll be asked for example, how a drug works in context of very complicated chemical principals (Tech seems to not go near these). You will be presented with something you’ve never ever seen before, and will have to use creativity to get you through. Tech syllabi even admit that exam problems will strictly adhere to the book. </p>
<p>How could the two of us be so different in the approach to teaching science courses? Is this natural at many say, public engineering schools I’ll admit Berkeley, seems to be trying, but Tech ranks really high, I thought it would be much better in science education than we are b/c it’s engineering geared, so those fundamental science courses that are supposed to help in w/e engineering field/courses (which are of course taught well, but there seems to be a gap between their quality and the “pre-reqs” and associated science courses) would be taken seriously and taught well. I mean, is it really impossible to employ some of the methods we use over here, or are they just incompatible w/engineering oriented education. Like the debacle that is organic over there (I’ll admit it could be as large as 240 people, but the prof. I referred to gives those exams to his 2 sections which total 180 and grades them himself and knows all student’s names. The other teacher that is really tough teaches 50-70 freshmen and does the same and also incorporates lots of group activities). One would think the course would integrate more intellectual rigor/applications for those going into chemE, BME, bio, and chem. itself. Their classes should be just as “intellectually” rigorous as ours. Engineers are really the people that need to understand the application and implications of various fields of science.
Note: Another difference is that teachers here play more of a role in student success. Somehow profs. even in large lectures turn into mentors and culminate a more personal relationship w/students. I guess part of it depends on how much the prof. cares. Over here, the hardest profs. tend to care the most. The easier ones are the ones that generally have no time for students (or have no desire to dedicate time to them) and thus no time to challenge students b/c they would have to dedicate extra effort to make them successful, so they water it down, teach poorly, and the averages are still low. Harder profs. have pretty solid averages considering the difficulty (the two profs. I mention generally get about 65-75 averages on exams much harder than other sections)</p>
<p>Sorry for the long post, but you seem to make astute observations on STEM education, and I’ve made some through experience. Just wondering if my observation citing potential differences between engineering oriented schools (or the engineering school itself) is valid and has any meaning behind it and why it happens.</p>
As an EE I have never had to address Maxwells Relations, but I did have to study Maxwells Equations which have a comparable reception. I would argue that these areas are a valuable part of undergraduate study for several reason:</p>
<p>1 They DO help to understand the underlying basis of much of what we do. If it doesnt help YOU, that is unfortunate. It helps many of us.
2 Some of us DO have to apply these on the job (I certainly did, and before I entered grad school!). Many jobs require you to understand these areas and apply them on demand.
3 Some of these areas are used more heavily at the grad level, but how do you expect people to gain understanding of their interest and ability in these areas without this exposure, and how do you expect us to stay competitive vs international students without it? My choice of grad study changed dramatically when I took my primary E&M course one of those hated weeders.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I think the rest of the colleges would have an issue with these, and that it would see a lot of abuse in most schools. The few schools that allow these kind of exceptions either focus in engineering and/or pre-screen for unusually high achievers. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I do not think that actually trying to normalize across college would necessarily work to me, the letter grade is meant to show the level of understanding of the material. In some classes, that will mean a lot of As (meaning the material is easy), while in others it will mean a lot of Cs (meaning the material is not). I see no reason to punish other majors for studying easier material just so I can inflate my grade.</p>
<p>At the same time, I have no problem with indicating some measure of relative performance on transcripts. Checking each individual course would be a logistical nightmare what time period do you compare to, how do you deal with different teachers for the same course, etc. Indicating the ranking of the student within the department, however, would probably be a very useful measure, and would serve much of the same purpose a Golf Management major and a Biomedical Engineering major could both note that they were in the top 25% of their departments, even if the former had a 3.5gpa and the latter had a 3.2gpa. It would be adding information and would not slur anyone in the process.</p>
<p>I should note that grades are an issue in other areas as well my wife was originally an education major, and when I noted that I was okay with Bs or even Cs in some courses, she HAD to push for straight As if she wanted to stand out even a little.</p>
<p>In other words, for every class where the grade distribution is low, you claim it as an example that “____ gives out poor grades”. For every class where the grade distribution is high, you claim it is that way “because all of the students getting lower grades dropped the class”.</p>
<p>One of the effects of grade inflation is to compress the effective range of grades at the top, so that small differences in grades or GPA become exaggerated in importance. A C grade used to be seen as a respectable passing grade, but now a B grade is seen as the minimum respectable grade. And the difference between a 3.7 and 3.8 GPA is effectively much larger now than before, since a much greater percentage of students is in that range.</p>
<p>Yeah, the inflation can suck. It also leads to many choosing courses and profs. based upon grading as opposed to quality. Like I mentioned, the easier graders (or those who give easier exams, whatever is considered ease) in sciences here are generally the lower quality professors, yet people don’t care. Pre-meds especially, have to look out for their grades, screw learning to a large extent, and hope for the best on the MCAT With a good prep. course, many will do really well. The fact that they are at a top 20 indicates that they already test well, at least standardized exams. Exams from tougher profs. in college…not so much. Just had to bring that up b/c some say that the high MCAT scores of those at top schools indicate that the schools are “tougher” than comparable publics. In reality, the students just test better. Low GPA, high MCAT may indicate a great tester that didn’t want to work as hard, or perhaps chose tougher classes/professors than peers. Either way, a person w/a 35 MCAT and a 2.9 is still kind of screwed, so the bottom line is, they must look out for their GPA by any means possible.<br>
Comment on grades across the college: Should material in some depts be so easy that the distribution is really skewed toward the top? It’s not the material, it’s normally how it’s presented, and the lack of demand on students. Like many history/polisci profs. could afford to assign students a much heavier reading or writing load and perhaps give quizzes or “in-class exams” as many classes give take home essay exams. The rigor is stepped up when you have to do the essay on the spot like in my Arab-Israeli Conflict class, that means you must be prepared at that moment in time. You can’t sit at home w/a book (or several) open to address the promp(s). Not only that, but sometimes profs will even grade these take-home exams shockingly easy. It seems as if my classes that did not have the “exam” (instead it was a series of short essays, quizzes, research paper, and maybe critical precis for certain readings to be presented in class) component graded writing harder and generally had a higher reading/workload and much higher standards in general. These were some of the better and more rewarding courses in non-sciences.
Often it has nothing to do with the material, it’s the difference in grading and workload that annoys science and engineering majors. If anything, profs. in those depts. need to just raise standards.</p>
<p>Well, why don’t you tell me where all of the ‘dropped grades’ are then? </p>
<p>It is a well-established fact that engineering experiences a high level of attrition. That is indeed what sparked this thread in the first place. Any fair grade distribution must then necessarily discuss what happens to the students who leave. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>And plenty of people decide to leave the EECS major once they discover how difficult it is and particularly once they receive low scores on their first midterms/homeworks. Furthermore, many people attempt to try to switch into EECS - and hence are ‘quasi-EECS majors’ (or at least wanna-be’s) - but are then deterred because of low scores. What happens to these students?</p>
<p>Just think about the situation logically. If you got one of the worst scores on your EECS 40 midterm, you’d probably drop too. On the other hand, if you got one of the best scores, you probably wouldn’t drop. The question then is, what ‘grade’ or place-holder is assigned to all of the students who drop? </p>
<p>By only looking at surviving soldiers, one would erroneously determine that nobody ever died in war. Similarly, by only looking at students who stuck with the class to completion and earned a final grade, you would erroneously determine that only a few students earned poor grades. So I ask again, what happened to all of the dropped students? </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Oh really? Classes like that are often times overcapacity, at least at the beginning, with students on the wait-list. Over time, the classes drop down to less-than-full capacity.</p>
<p>How many engineers have ever taken a Real Analysis course? Should they be mandated to do so?</p>
<p>Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not preventing anybody from learning anything. Anybody who wants to learn Real Analysis is free to do so. The question is, should you be forced to do so? Right now, few if any engineering programs force their students to take Real Analysis, because they deem the material to not be relevant to most of them. But by the same logic, much of the engineering material that is mandated is also surely not relevant to most of them.</p>
<p>The concept of integration to find the area under a curve is taught in freshman (or high school) calculus; one does not need to take real analysis to know that, although one can take real analysis to get the full rigorous treatment of the subject. That is why the medical research paper in question is so surprising (and disappointing).</p>
<p>Re: EE 40</p>
<p>Well, we’ll just have to wait until the first week of the fall semester to see how full the EE 40 course and waiting list are in order to get actual data as to the interest level at the beginning of the semester. And then track it at least to the drop deadline to see whether your speculation about the number of drops is actually the case. As it is now, you have not proved your point, but only made an unproven hypothesis.</p>
<p>As far as attrition goes, it may not be due to engineering courses, since freshmen in engineering typically take math, physics, and chemistry courses. One can speculate that faculty and TAs teaching those subjects know that most students are just passing through on the way to some other major, so may be less interested in the students’ interests (whatever they may be) than in courses mostly populated by majors (e.g. math courses for math majors, engineering courses for engineering majors, etc.). But that would just be speculation, and someone interested in whether that was true may want to look into it more rather than assuming it is true.</p>
<p>Maxwell’s Relations and Maxwell’s Equations have absolutely nothing to do with one another, except for the name. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I would argue that it didn’t help anybody. After all, how much did the students understand the M.R.'s when the midterm mean score was a 25%, and a 30% was a cause for celebration? Nobody understood anything. </p>
<p>It certainly didn’t help that girl who stayed at Berkeley to complete her PhD in 3 years, and still freely admits that to this day, she still doesn’t understand the M.R.'s (and doesn’t care). </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: how many practicing engineers in industry have ever used the M.R.'s? </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Students are free to take an optional class, just like how right now, engineers are free to take Real Analysis as an elective. But nobody is going to force you to take it. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Your statement is belied by some of the other postings on this thread, where it seems as if other chemical engineering programs don’t really teach the M.R.'s either. </p>
<p>To quote ElevatemeLater: </p>
<p>…I never spent that much time on Maxwell Relations in my ChemE thermo course. At most we spent half a class period talking about and never had to deal with a question about them on any exams…</p>
<p>So if he didn’t have to worry so much about the M.R.'s in his chemical engineering program, why do other chemical engineering students have to do so? In particular, why do students get weeded out because of the M.R.'s when students at other schools apparently “never had to deal with a single question about them on any exams” at all? Some of those students who were weeded out would have probably done just fine if they had gone to ElevatemeLater’s school. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>If the other colleges have an issue with that, hey, that’s their problem. Each school should be worried about improving the prospects of its own students. </p>
<p>Regarding the notion of abuse, hey, plenty of abuse already happens right now at most schools. If schools want to curb abuse, they should curb all types of abuse - notably the ‘abuse’ engendered by students cruising through a 4-year party and an easy degree via creampuff majors - not just focusing on whatever abuse may happen within the engineering program. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>But right now, grading in engineering often times has little to do with understanding the material on any absolute basis, but instead reflects only your relative understanding of the material compared to other students, regardless of how much or how little that may be.</p>
<p>Again, I know a guy who earned a 30% on an engineering exam…and celebrated. Why? Because the mean was a 25%. Basically nobody - including the guy in question - understood the material well. But it doesn’t matter that don’t understand the material well because all that matters is that other people understand it less than you do. </p>
<p>Similarly, it doesn’t matter if you understand the material well…if the other students understand it even better. Earning a 80’s% score doesn’t help if the average score was a 95%. Indeed, it may mean that you just failed. </p>
<p>The upshot is that, as things stand right now, the letter grade that you earn in an engineering class often times has little to do with what you actually know about the material on any absolute basis. Grading is relative. In the land of the blind, one-eyed men are kings. </p>
<p>But it doesn’t need to be. The lowest-scoring student in the class might nevertheless still be a competent engineer. But we’ll never know because he was weeded out.</p>
<p>So you agree with me that engineers should not be required to take Real Analysis? </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>First off, I never said that I knew that half of the students dropped EE40. I said that a significant fraction do drop, perhaps up to half. </p>
<p>But what is clear - and I doubt that you dispute - is that many students do drop. And surely you would agree that most who drop do so because they were scoring poorly. </p>
<p>So here’s my question for you: exactly what grade distribution do you think they would have earned if they had stayed in the class?</p>
<p>What does real analysis have to do with the idea that someone who took freshman (or high school) calculus should remember how the area under a curve relates to integration?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>How many are you claiming is “many”? You are trying to dismiss actual data on grade distributions by claiming a large drop rate due to poor performance, without providing any information on how large the drop rate actually is, or the reasons why students drop it (which may be poor grades, but may also be due to scheduling fit or other issues like getting into too many courses and needing to drop one).</p>
<p>Sakky, the fact that ElevatemeLater’s school doesn’t spend much time on the Maxwell Relations does NOT mean that the M.R.'s serve no purpose at Berkeley other than to weed people out. It just means that the ChemE programs at ElevatemeLater’s school and Berkeley have different goals. Where does it say that the Berkeley ChemE department’s only goal is to prepare students for industry? Maybe they want to make sure that students are prepared to study any aspect of ChemE at the graduate level? This is probably in part due to the fact that Berkeley ChemE has strong ties to chemistry and physics, more so than if the department were in the college of engineering. Is there anything wrong with Berkeley ChemE having a more academia-centric focus than other departments around the country? I haven’t taken ChemE 141 yet, but I’m really happy that my department takes a more rigorous approach to thermodynamics than other departments. </p>
<p>It’s not like students are being forced to come to Berkeley…students that just want to be regular engineers in industry can take their pick from hundreds of schools in this country. Many Berkeley ChemE students I know (including myself) are really interested in graduate school and eventually academia. I’m sure that learning the underlying thermodynamics theory will put us in good stead for the future. I would be really disappointed if my department took shortcuts just to make the program “doable” for uninterested, mediocre students.</p>
<p>The most talented students leave engineering because: </p>
<ol>
<li><p>Engineering is a real grind and most classes involve memorizing tons of information. Post-graduation opportunities being equal, most students would prefer to learn interesting things in humanities, math, and physics - not the 6 level voltage state on an N-type 523490 transistor flipper. The flipside of this is that engineering doesn’t reward students with high intelligence. It rewards the students who spend the most time studying and cramming, which obviously doesn’t appeal to the best students. This extends to colleges as well. Companies often prefer to find engineers at the schools where the students work the hardest and take the most classes - the state flagships, and not the schools where the students are the strongest. </p></li>
<li><p>The information is not transferable at all. An advanced elective on VLSI design is only useful if I work as a microelectronics engineer and it might only matter on specific projects. Knowledge of say, mathematics or physics, on the other hand are broadly applicable. </p></li>
<li><p>The information you learn could become useless if technologies change. At best the rate of change is gradual, but even than experienced engineers might find that their practical knowledge is more limited than that of new engineers. I know that there’s no way to change this, but it is a real downside to the profession. </p></li>
<li><p>Engineering definitely has more jobs than other majors, but it doesn’t have that many of the “really good” jobs (CS is a different story). You can get those really good jobs with an engineering degree, but it doesn’t really help. Most engineering jobs have decent starting pay but very slow promotions and a modest salary ceiling.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Oh really? According to [WSJ.com[/url</a>] , the top 4 college majors (based on mid-career salary) are engineering degrees (chemical, computer, electrical, and aerospace). Of the top 10, 6 are engineering (7 if you count CS). </p>
<p>Man, that “modest salary ceiling” for engineering majors sure sucks, eh? I have no issues with your three other points, but the extent to which this myth is perpetuated just blows my mind. I’m genuinely curious, which undergraduate degree would you suggest for faster promotions and a higher salary ceiling?</p>
<p>The best students in any subject typically need to spend less time studying and cramming compared to the worst students, for any given outcome in learning and grade.</p>
<p>Now, it is true that engineering and science courses with labs are more time consuming on average than most other courses, but that is not specific to the best or worst students.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>State flagships (and non-flagships) may appeal to those recruiting engineering graduates because:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>They are usually big. One recruiting stop lets you recruit from a much larger pool of students than one recruiting stop at a small school.</p></li>
<li><p>They have engineering degree programs. Many of what are often considered the top schools have no or limited engineering degree programs.</p></li>
<li><p>The home state flagship (or non-flagship) is often much more convenient in terms of visiting the career center than a far away school.</p></li>
<li><p>ABET accreditation puts at least a theoretical floor on what students learn in an ABET accredited engineering degree program.</p></li>
</ol>