<p>But that’s only at Berkely though. I know people in Chem E here at Case don’t even know what it is, much less even deal with them to the extend that you’re talking about. </p>
<p>Even so, if M.R.s (whatever those are) are so hard, why not just accept it, get through it, and move on? if its part of the curriculum, no use in complaining about it since you cant change it. </p>
<p>But like I said before, I do agree with you in that some engineering programs need to be tailored to what will be useful for outside the undergaduate days instead of useless pre reqs</p>
<p>Well, I’m not sure it’s as clear-cut as this. Certainly some might object to the method you propose for determining which students are stubborn/ignorant/dumb; why should it be assumed that I will behave the same way that other students with my credentials behaved? I’m of the opinion that grades don’t mean a lot, and I think you’d agree that two people with the same grades can be very different in terms of the seriousness with which they approach their education.</p>
<p>Perhaps a more compassionate and academically honest solution to the problem of poor grades isn’t to clean the slate, but for academics to look more compassionately on poor past performance. Reasonable people should realize that poor performance in a good engineering program isn’t necessarily an indication that poor performance in e.g. business or teaching will follow. Then again, perhaps academia uses poor past performance in higher education as a means of predicting how “stubborn/ignorant/dumb” students are; and who’s to say this isn’t justified?</p>
<p>Are there potentially better ways to determine the potential of students? Perhaps, yes; I tend to think there are. However, I’m not sure I agree that either of the two methods you outline - predicting an individual’s success based on the past success of similarly-qualified students and eliminating poor past performance from the academic record - are particularly good ideas.</p>
<p>This thread seems to be leading nowhere but thanks cosmicfish for giving me some hope next year. Although your own personal experience may be a special case (i hope its more universal) it at least gives me hope that if i fail out of engineering maybe i can still persevere. </p>
<p>Sakky i sure hope your wrong. I dont want to flunk out and have…</p>
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<p>Cosmicfish do you have an albatross wrapped around your neck?</p>
<p>I probably took that out of context but sakky you just sound so pessimistic. I mean is it really the end of the world if you flunk out of engineering? If your right i take back my comment but you provide no insight into what its like to fail engineering and then be unable to succeed. If you could provide some testimony (other thread etc) to this that’d be great.</p>
<p>OK, here is my opinion. Engineering students should be supported by living communities where they are with like-minded people who don’t have time to party from Thurs. to Monday. That alone would help a lot of people succeed.</p>
<p>And they should make the liberal arts classes comparably difficult (i.e. 10-20x more difficult than they currently are) and grade accordingly. That alone would impact drinking rates at colleges.</p>
<p>I always drank more than liberal arts students - not because I wanted to, but because I needed to. I think this was (is?) common among math guys.</p>
<p>Sure, if people could. But that precisely highlights the problem: many people couldn’t. Specifically, they flunked the required thermo course and hence were weeded out of the program because they didn’t understand the M.R.'s - something that, as we’ve all agreed, you don’t really need to know if you just want to be a regular chemical engineer. </p>
<p>The irony is that even the people who did manage to pass the course often times didn’t understand the M.R.'s either. Like I said the average midterm score was a 25%, which meant that you (barely) passed. According to the curve, a 20% meant that you failed. Honestly, what’s the difference between a score of 20% and a 25%? Either way, you clearly didn’t know much about the M.R.'s at all. Was that extra 5% really that important? </p>
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<p>I disagree - I think we can change it. Curricula do change over time, particularly in response to alumni concerns. </p>
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<p>Well, look, the truth is, colleges reject boatloads of applicants right now based on predictive individual success factors. They just do so qualitatively, and often times in an ad-hoc manner. For example, right now, adcoms are weighing the (supposed) impressiveness of students’ extracurricular activities, essay answers, or interview responses to determine admissions. Why should the fact that somebody who was captain of the football team be judged to be ‘more impressive’ than somebody who was President of the Glee Club (or vice versa) with the same stats when it comes to admissions decisions? Yet that happens now.</p>
<p>Hence, my take is, if schools are going to be taking those types of factors into account when making admissions decisions anyway, why not do so in a quantitatively rigorous and statistically predictive fashion? </p>
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<p>But we know that this doesn’t happen. They never look compassionately upon poor performance. </p>
<p>To give you a specific case in point, the prestigious Marshall Scholarships specifically mandate that you have a 3.7 GPA before you can even apply. If you failed a number of engineering courses - which surely means that you will never obtain a 3.7 - they don’t care why. All they care about is that you don’t have a 3.7. </p>
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<p>Then I would return to the examples of real-world failure in other endeavors. Jennifer Granholm basically ‘stubbornly failed’ in her acting career: she spent years in Hollywood without obtaining any solid acting roles. Yet nobody seems to hold that against her. She was able to be admitted to top colleges and law school thereafter. </p>
<p>Or take the late Macho Man Randy Savage (Randy Poffo). Before he was a professional wrestler, he was basically a ‘failed’ and ‘stubborn’ pro baseball player, having bounced around the minor leagues for years without ever having been promoted to the Majors. Yet nobody held that against him. He was able to move on to great success in another career. </p>
<p>History is replete with people who failed in one career but who then went on to smashing success in another, without having the failure in that first career impact opportunities in the second. Harvard Law School didn’t tell Granholm “Since you used to be a failed and stubborn actress, which is basically equivalent to a string of F’s, we’re not going to admit you to our law school.” </p>
<p>So what makes engineering different? Why are failed engineers singled out for reprisals? People are allowed to walk away from failed endeavors in all other walks of life, so why not in engineering? Why is failure in engineering considered to be a character flaw that somehow needs to be ‘fixed’, when failure in other endeavors is not? </p>
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<p>Again, the problem is that if you flunk out of engineering, other (respectable) schools don’t really want to take you as a transfer applicant because you had flunked out of your previous school. Note, they won’t care why you flunked out. All they will see is that you flunked out. </p>
<p>Heck, sometimes even other constituent colleges in your same school may not want to take you. This leads to the ‘engineering major trap’ - as an engineering student who is performing poorly, you may find that you can’t switch out of the major because other majors in the other constituent colleges at your school don’t want to take you, hence forcing you to stay in engineering, and probably flunk out completely. </p>
<p>Even if you are able to eventually escape and graduate - whether in engineering or another major - those failed engineering grades scar your academic record for life. Hence, your chances of entering grad school or obtain employment are permanently impaired. You will always have to explain why your academic record is tattoo’ed with a series of failed grades. If you are ever asked as part of a job application or grad-school application whether you have been placed on academic probation/suspension, you will have to answer ‘yes’. Granted, maybe you can tell a good story about your past to explain what had happened. But let’s be honest: many employers and grad schools won’t even give you the chance to tell that story. They’ll just see your record of failed grades, and they won’t care why you failed. They’ll just decide right then and there not to hire/admit you. </p>
<p>That’s why I continue to ask the question: why is it perfectly fine to fail in other endeavors in life, but not in engineering? For example, I know some people who tried to play for the NFL but only made the practice squad or were cut while in training camp. Hence, they basically “failed” in their football careers. I know others who tried to become professional musicians, having started their own bands that never became popular. They basically ‘failed’ in their music careers. Yet nobody holds that against them. They’re allowed to move onto other careers with a clean slate. </p>
<p>I thought about this point more, and it might actually make a modicum of logical sense…if the students clearly benefited from the unique emphasis placed upon the M.R.'s. For example, if Berkeley was world-renowned for producing chemical engineers who actually understood - however modestly - the M.R.'s, and if Berkeley then became the premier “go to” school of choice for top firms who needed employees who were trained in the M.R.'s. Other chemical engineers, upon meeting a graduate of Berkeley, should immediately recognize them as being 'M.R. gurus".</p>
<p>I’ve never heard of any of that happening. However unique and painful the Berkeley M.R. training may be, the inescapable fact is that nobody seems to know about it. Either that, or nobody cares. Berkeley chemical engineers don’t seem to have significantly better success in the market over chemical engineers from even the average school. The average starting salary for graduating ChemE’s from Berkeley in 2010 was $63k, which was actually lower than that of ChemE’s nationwide. That’s right - lower. Hence, Berkeley ChemE’s simply seem to be undergoing unique pain, but not in return for any unique benefits. </p>
<p>Now, granted, one could argue that the answer then is to simply say that students perhaps shouldn’t go to Berkeley for chemical engineering. I agree that that is an answer that some should consider. But why does the onus have to always be on the student? Admission and graduation is a bilateral decision. If the students should sometimes make different decisions, then perhaps the school also needs to make different decisions. </p>
<p>Specifically, if a school believes that requiring the M.R.'s (or anything else) provide unique competitive advantages to their students, then they should have problem in marketing that supposed advantage to employers. Employers should then be flocking to that school to hire students who have that unique training (if that training does indeed provide value). Either that, or the school perhaps should reconsider why they’re requiring something that other schools don’t, and that apparently isn’t highly marketable.</p>
<p>The VAST majority of exceptional football players fail to play in the NFL. Even some Heisman trophy winners totally fail after entering the NFL. Likewise, only a handful of talented professional musicians achieve any kind of commercial or critical success. Thus, failure in professional music or the NFL does not signal incompetence, only bad luck. On the other hand, less selective engineering programs might have a 50% success rate, so being on the failing side does signal that you are probably a weaker student than your peers.</p>
<p>By the same token that the vast majority of football players never make it to the NFL, similarly, the vast majority of exceptional students are never admitted to a school such as Berkeley at all, let alone being able to survive the engineering program. A terrible Berkeley engineering student may be worse than his engineering peers at Berkeley, but is still surely better than plenty of other students at average schools. </p>
<p>Heck, the same is surely true of even the engineering students at the average school. Let’s face it. Somebody earning a 1.9 GPA in engineering (and hence failing) at Idaho State University is almost surely a harder working and more intelligent student than his Idaho State colleague earning a 2.3 GPA (and passing) while majoring in American Studies. So why is the engineer singled out to be punished by marking his permanent transcript with failure? Why not at least let him switch over to American Studies with a clean slate? Just because you happen to be a weak student relative to your engineering peers doesn’t mean that you couldn’t be highly successful in another endeavor. </p>
<p>But let me make the sports/engineering analogy even more clear. I can think of quite a few guys who wanted to play sports yet couldn’t even make the high school team even after years of trying. To be clear, we’re not exactly talking about a high school with a top football program (in fact, we never had a winning football record during my entire time). It wasn’t that hard to make the high school team, yet they couldn’t even do that. I am certain that getting admitted to Berkeley is far harder than making it onto the high school football team. I can also think of other guys who wanted to play football in college yet not only never progressed beyond being non-scholarship walk-ons (which anybody can do), but never once were given playing time, even during blowouts. All of these guys could be said to have clearly ‘failed’ in their football endeavors.</p>
<p>But nobody holds that against them. Nobody says: “Well, you couldn’t even make your high school team, or you couldn’t get even a single minute of playing time while being a college walk-on, so since you’ve clearly been an incompetent football player, we’re going to punish you for the rest of your life by marking your permanent record with failure.” People are allowed to fail miserably in sports yet move onto other endeavors with a clean slate. Why not engineering?</p>
<p>After all, even if you were the absolute worst engineering student in the world, what does that have to do with your ability to become a perfectly competent lawyer or office manager? Similarly, even if it could be shown that Jennifer Granholm was a failed actress not because of bad luck but because she was truly a horrible actress - that we could find YouTube videos of her completely botching her lines and displaying terrible acting ability - why should that affect her ability to attend a top undergraduate and later a top law school? If I am the worst baseball player in the world - i.e. I simply can’t hit or catch even the simplest play- why should that affect my academic career? </p>
<p>And similarly, if I am a truly horrible engineer, why should that affect my pursuit of a non-engineering career? </p>
<p>What’s truly sad is that such an attitude gravely discourages academic exploration and risk-taking. Within an academic standpoint, it’s better to never even try anything difficult at all (i.e. engineering courses) than to try them and perform poorly. By the same token, if people were permanently punished for trying and failing in sports, then surely far fewer people would even try to play sports.</p>
<p>So I continue to ask the question: why is it perfectly fine for people to be so incompetent at sports that they can’t even make their high school team, and nobody will hold that against them later in life, but poor performance in engineering courses is considered to be a ‘problem’ and a ‘character flaw’ that deserves condign punishment via permanent damage to one’s future career prospects?</p>
<p>yeah your point about having a clean slate is valid. However wouldnt you run into the problem of individuals from other majors complaining about the discrepancy? I mean doesn’t someone in physics or mathematics have a similar claim? I dont know the difficulty of each but there not easy majors either. </p>
<p>How would you differentiate between the “hard” majors and “easy” majors?</p>
<p>I agree that physics and math students should have the same right. There just happen to be far fewer physics/math students at most schools. Hence, I am going to concentrate upon engineering, where the problem is most salient. But I have no objection to helping them as well. </p>
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<p>I could think of a number of indicators:</p>
<p>1) Average grade handed out within various majors. Let’s face it - very few students ever flunk out of American Studies.</p>
<p>2)Reputation of the major amongst graduating students. You would likely find very few graduating seniors - whether they majored in engineering or not - who consider engineering to be the school’s ‘joke’ major predominantly populated by unmotivated students who are looking for an easy degree.</p>
<p>3) Survey of how many hours are spent studying by students in each major, normalized by number of units. I think it is well understood that 4 units of American Studies requires far less strenuous work than does 4 units (or, heck, even 2 units) of engineering. </p>
<p>4) Student major migration patterns. One could see how many poorly performing engineering students switch over to and graduate from American Studies, compared to how many poorly performing American Studies students - if any even exist at all - switch over to and graduate from engineering. </p>
<p>A quantitative validation scheme using those 4 measures and others will surely discover that certain majors are substantially easier than others.</p>
<p>Inward vs. outward migration won’t really tell you too much because inward migration to engineering and some other majors is blocked by long prerequisite chains. A student who has already completed three semesters is not going to want to move into a major with six or seven semester long prerequisite chains that start with a course that s/he has not taken. On the other hand, if a major like history has no prerequisites for any of its courses, the same student is much more likely to be able to migrate into history, even if s/he has not taken any history courses before.</p>
<p>The lack of prerequisite chains may, however, indirectly cause a major to be less rigorous. Instructors teaching standalone courses that are not prerequisites for any other course (or accreditation of the major) have less incentive to ensure that students who pass the course learned something, compared to instructors teaching courses that are prerequisites to something else, because they’ll get heat from instructors of the later courses if the students do poorly because they did not learn the prerequisite stuff.</p>
<p>That is counterbalanced by the fact that graduating with an engineering degree usually means much better job and career prospects than graduating with a degree in what you may call an “easy” major. You may think going into engineering is riskier, but there is a reward attached to that.</p>
<p>Also, a few schools do have a policy called “academic bankruptcy” in which one can erase a previous semester – no grades will be counted, but no credits from the courses taken (even if passed) can be used to a degree (and it may mean automatically going to academic probation upon doing so).</p>
<p>And if you really want to point fingers at anyone for discouraging academic exploration and risk taking, point fingers at medical and law schools, which are basically GPA and MCAT or LSAT focused, not caring if the applicant’s 3.9 GPA was in “hard” or “easy” courses (beyond the minimum set of pre-med courses in the case of medical schools – though a lot of pre-meds still have not figured out that majoring in biology means more work (labs), probable less grade inflation, and poor job and career prospects if one does not get into medical school).</p>
<p>And I don’t see why that risk needs to be necessarily tied to the reward. Professional sports is highly rewarding if you become a star - the average Major League Baseball player makes millions a year - yet as I’ve mentioned, the ‘career risk’ is nil. You can be the absolute worst baseball player in the history of your high school/college, yet that’s not going to hurt your other career prospects. Nobody is going to mark your permanent academic record with the moniker of ‘failed baseball player’. Nobody is going to care. Similarly, becoming a star actor or musician will shower you in riches, but if you fail, nobody really cares. </p>
<p>But somehow being a ‘failed engineer’ (or failed science major) is a serious character flaw that forever damages your career prospects, and I still don’t understand why. </p>
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<p>Actually, I would point fingers at the grade-inflated humanities and social sciences, as well as the Deans and University Presidents who permitted those majors to become grade inflated. If the engineers and natural science majors should be harshly weeded, fair enough, so should the humanities and social science students. Otherwise, nobody should be harshly weeded. Schools shouldn’t exhibit such dramatic intra-school grade inflation amongst different majors.</p>
<p>I think you’re stretching the analogy a bit when you compare “failed acting to successful Harvard law” to “failed engineering to failed Harvard law”. Engineering and Harvard law have a lot more in common than Acting does with Harvard Law (heh, jokes aside, anyway).</p>
<p>They’re both about learning/training/education/instruction (LTEI). It doesn’t seem so unreasonable to me to use an individual’s LTEI history to predict future LTEI performance to me. If anything, it seems a lot more reasonable to do this than to use LTEI history to predict job performance, and for a lot of people and corporations, that is the end-game of college.</p>
<p>I don’t think that a failed engineer would be denied professional sports positions, acting roles, etc. at a higher rate than anybody else… perhaps I’m wrong. Then again, if they are, this may have more to do with the kind of person who decides to major in engineering and then fails, than with the fact that they actually did it.</p>
<p>Regarding your question as to the difference between being captain of different clubs… it’s certainly possible that past students’ performance informs the adcom’s decision somewhat regarding the relative merits of different clubs… but call me naive, I feel like this has less to do with past students’ performance and more with the adcom’s biases based on perceived status differences between the clubs themselves. Maybe I’m naive, but I doubt the adcoms would reject somebody who was president of the AV club, just because the drop-out rate for past members of the AV club is higher than for past captains of the soccer team.</p>
<p>Career risk is non-nil. Most professional baseball players spend a lot of time in minor leagues (at subsistence pay). Most do not make it to the major leagues at all. After years in the minor leagues, perhaps with injuries, etc. they may leave with no transferable skills, unless they get lucky in landing a job as a coach in a school or something.</p>
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<p>“Weeding” is an unavoidable effect when there are prerequisite chains where the first course material is necessary for the next course; the instructor of the first course needs to conform to some expected curriculum and ensure that students who pass the course know the material enough to use it in the next course. (This does not mean that, in any given class, that any students are “weeded out”, if all students in that particular class learn the material well enough.)</p>
<p>If you wanted to change the incentives in humanities departments, you may want to take a different approach. Lobby them to make the upper level courses depend on lower level course prerequisites (e.g. to take a US history course that focuses in depth on some aspect, a prerequisite of a general US history course can be listed). Instructors of the upper level courses may prefer that, since they can then avoid spending time on the more general stuff that students who took the lower level course should know. That, in turn, creates the incentive to raise the minimum bar of learning in the lower level courses.</p>
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<p>While there are differences, it may not be at the “dramatic” level – the paper referenced on [National</a> Trends in Grade Inflation, American Colleges and Universities](<a href=“http://www.gradeinflation.com%5DNational”>http://www.gradeinflation.com) suggests that for GPA, humanities - science ~= 0.3, while social studies - science and engineering - science ~= 0.2.</p>
<p>Sakky’s argument falls apart: The worst baseball player can become a successful movie star. And the worst engineer can become the best baseball player, movie star, tennis player, cook, artist, etc. But lets face it: if you utterly fail out of an engineering program (which at 99% of universities takes a great deal more negligence than doing poorly in one class), you probably won’t be successful in many other quantitative fields. Your poor performance can usually be traced to bad study habits.</p>
<p>Uh, not only does my argument not fall apart, what you stated actually (ironically) entirely validates my argument. Certainly, a failed baseball player can become a movie star. But on the other hand, a failed engineer will find it difficult to even become a non-quantitative knowledge worker, because schools and employers are going to take his academic record of having flunked out as a negative signal. It won’t matter if he flunked out because of a difficult engineering program and now wants to transfer to another school to major in English, the fact that he flunked out hinders him from transferring to even a non-quant program. </p>
<p>That’s why I continue to ask the question: what’s so controversial about a guy who flunks out of engineering being allowed to leave with a clean slate? He could become highly successful while majoring in the humanities. Even if he persists in majoring in some other quant field, presumably that quant field will then weed him out. So what’s the harm? </p>
<p>Put another way, what exactly is to be gained from forcing people to carry failed engineering grades in their permanent record if they’re no longer majoring in engineering anymore? </p>
<p>Now, certainly, I agree that somebody who flunks out of engineering probably did have bad study habits. But somebody who earns a 2.1 GPA in Leisure Studies surely had bad study habits too, yet he’s still allowed to graduate with a degree, chiefly to the grade inflation and lax standards of that major. If we want to pick on students with poor study habits, why single out the engineers? We should be picking on all students with poor study habits, regardless of major. That would probably mean shutting down, or at least dramatically increasing the rigor of, creampuff majors. </p>
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<p>Uh, no, what I clearly meant by career-risk is what signal is sent to the market. If you fail as a baseball player, you can still apply to college with a clean slate. The fact that your baseball career did not succeed will not be held against you.</p>
<p>Otherwise, we should also be calculating the ‘career risk’, broadly speaking, of spending years in an engineering program and flunking out, which also meant that, just as a failed baseball player, you wasted years of time and likely accumulated substantial student debt while learning few transferable skills. </p>
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<p>I’m not sure that that’s necessarily the case, and I would return back to the example of what it takes to graduate with a humanities Phd. There are few if any ‘prereq chains’ necessary to obtain a PhD in humanities. But that hardly makes it easy to obtain. Far from it: around half of all humanities PhD students never actually finish the degree, and even of those that do, many take over a decade to do so. </p>
<p>Now, obviously nobody is expecting PhD-level work from undergrads. But what it does mean is that just because the knowledge base of a particular disciplinary field doesn’t build atop itself in a sequential manner doesn’t mean that it is necessary easy to produce ‘acceptable’ work in that field. </p>
<p>Hence, what humanities departments could do is force all humanities students to take a series of senior capstone courses - akin to “mini-dissertation-courses” - as requirements for graduation and where the grading is extremely harsh. </p>
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<p>Actually, no, that paper clearly states that the effect of different grading standards causes disincentives to enroll in science/engineering, which then obviously serves to mitigate and mask the ostensible GPA differentials. For example, weaker students in sci/engineering, who are far more likely to earn terrible grades in science/engineering had they been forced to stay in those majors, instead tend to switch to major in the humanities where they might still earn relatively low but nevertheless passing grades because of the grade inflation in humanities. On the other hand, few weak humanities students switch to science/engineering. {Instead, they simply drop out altogether.} Hence, the 0.2-0.4 GPA difference is strongly biased downward. </p>
<p>What would be necessary to unbias the model is to take those weak sci/engineering students who switch to the humanities, and compute a predictive model about what their sci/engineering grades would have been had they been forced to stay in that major.</p>
<p>But we all know that that happens right now. Let’s face it - for most decent careers today, you basically need a college degree. It doesn’t really matter what the major of the degree is, it doesn’t even really matter what your GPA was. What really matters is whether you have a degree at all.</p>
<p>The guy who flunks out of engineering ends up with no degree at all, and limited prospects for earning one in the future, simply because no decent school wants to admit a transfer student who had flunked out of his previous school. Hence, a failed engineering student is clearly worse off than if he had never even gone to college at all. For example, if a high school senior decides to enter the workforce directly, he can later in life decide to apply to college using his high school academic record. However, if that same high school senior goes to college, majors in engineering and flunks out, those failed courses remain on his academic record for life. He would have been better off had he simply gone right to the workforce right after high school.</p>
<p>And that’s sad. Your permanent record should never become worse off by going to college. After all, somebody who moves to Hollywood in pursuit of acting dreams yet never lands any acting roles isn’t worse off. He’s not better off, but nor is he worse off either. Somebody who has only a subpar minor league baseball career hasn’t made his permanent record worse off. Again, not better off, but not worse off either. But somebody who flunks out of engineering has actually made his record worse off than if he had never went to college at all.. </p>
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<p>I agree. But then why should he be denied the opportunity to earn a *non-*engineering degree? If he wants to major in Art History now, why should his failed engineering courses hinder him? What does Art History have to do with engineering? </p>
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<p>Obviously they don’t. But that’s the point - maybe they should. That is, if for whatever reason, presidents of the AV club seem to flunk out (not just drop out, but flunk out) at a higher rate than do soccer captains, then maybe schools should not admit so many AV presidents. </p>
<p>To be clear, the link doesn’t have to be causal. Being AV President doesn’t have to cause people to flunk out in college. It may well be that some other variable is correlated with both being AV President and flunking out in college. But we don’t care about that, as we don’t care why the link exists. All that matters is that the link exists and is statistically stable. </p>
<p>To give you a case in point, I think it has been shown that drivers of red cars tend to be charged higher car insurance premiums because they suffer from higher accident rates. Now, perhaps driving a red car causes people to drive more aggressively. Or perhaps dangerous drivers just happen to prefer to buy red cars in the first place. Or maybe it’s simply that, for some reason, red cars are more difficult for other drivers to see and avoid crashing into. As an insurance agent, I don’t know why, and I don’t care. All that matters is that, for whatever reason, red cars are statistically and predictively associated with higher accident rates, and that’s all I care about.</p>
<p>Perhaps this example will make things more clear. Instead of somebody majoring in engineering and failing, what if instead, he had simply never gone to college at all, but instead chose to study engineering on his own time? {To make the analogy clear, I can think of a number of people who never went to college but instead learned software development skills - which is arguably a form of engineering. I can also think of several other people who never went to college but had learned hot-rodding and mechanical tinkering skills to customize high-performance cars via the import scene and street racing; I would argue that that’s akin to mechanical engineering skills.} </p>
<p>Now, what if they had been incompetent? For example, what if those guys who had learned software development on their own time could never write a single piece of code that wasn’t buggy? What if every single website they ever developed wouldn’t even load? What if they could never even properly compile any of their code? For the purposes of future admission to college and grad school, it wouldn’t matter. </p>
<p>In other words, as long as you fail while outside the confines of a college course, then it effectively didn’t happen. If you try to learn software programming on your own and your code never compiles, nobody will ever know. But if you try to learn software programming as part of an actual college class, and your code never compiles, now you have a big fat F forever polluting your permanent academic record. But why should the fact that it happened in a class matter? Either way, you tried to learn software skills and failed. </p>
<p>Which returns us to the point I made before: it is, sadly, better not even to take a difficult course at all, than to take it and fail. If you want to learn the material, it’s safer for you to try to learn it on your own time, because if you then try and fail, nobody’s the wiser. It basically never happened.</p>