And yet there are plenty of engineers today who didn’t even come close to sniffing a 3.0 GPA. Indeed, a not insignificant fraction of them barely squeaked by with the bare minimum GPA required to graduate (which is a 2.0 at most schools).
Come on, boneh3ad, I think you would agree that those guys hardly understood the material at all. Their fundamentals are basically non-existent.
Nevertheless, they still graduated. They still hold bonafide accredited engineering degrees. They’re still employed as engineers. Sure, the demands of their positions do not involve anything even close to that of designing Corvettes or airplanes. Yet their job title still says ‘engineer’. Nor do I detect any movement to remove them from the profession.
Now, perhaps you might argue that they should be removed from the profession. Yet the fact remains that they’re not. Perhaps you might argue that engineering programs shouldn’t graduate anybody with a GPA lower than a 3.0. Yet the fact remains that they do.
That exemplifies my central point that only a small fraction of the extant engineering jobs actually require that one, on a day-to-day basis, deeply understand the technical content that comprises the modern-day engineering curricula.
Look, I wish I could tell people that every (or at least, the majority of) engineering position involves the designing Corvettes, Ford or John Deere engines, new airplanes, suspension bridges such as the Tacoma Falls, or tasks of comparable technical complexity and scale. But that would be a lie. Most engineering roles are rather technically mundane. Indeed, most engineers that I know have outright stated that the day-to-day technical demands of their roles require little more than high school math.