<p>weaker colleges deal with their courses? I have a school that I am looking at where the average SAT score for their accepted engineering students is 1240 (CR + M)(This school is ranked 55th for C.E.) Would almost all of their students struggle with the engineering curriculum?(Well, I know obviously there are going to be a minority that will handle it well… but it’s kind of meant to be a question about the majority) I know some members on this board think that engineering courses are similar among many universities, so, if highly intelligent students at top colleges have trouble with the material, how do students, of less academic aptitude, deal with engineering classes? Do most of them just get together and study? Thanks guys.</p>
<p>Everyone struggles because it’s hard material. I imagine schools with “smarter” students will cover material in a different way such as to decrease the amount of direct teaching of the material and increase the amount of independent learning.</p>
<p>Once you’ve learned most of the concepts in your engineering classes you realize they’re all pretty simple in the first place and if someone had just sat you down and told you directly what they wanted you to know it would actually be a pretty simple thing to do.</p>
<p>In my opinion… engineering requires more hard work+motivation than intelligence.
I have never in my life seen an engineering student who excelled without working hours on projects, homeworks, and test preps, *yet.</p>
<p>I think this is a little bit different for science majors where intelligence plays a bigger role. (Please correct me if I’m wrong… since I don’t know much about science majors). For example, my friends is a CS… and he doesn’t seem to put too much time in his work even though he has excellent grades compared to another friend who does study for longer periods of time with a significantly lower grade. </p>
<p>Either way, finding your motivation is key in my opinion.</p>
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<p>My theory is that at the $30k a year school with an average SAT of ~600, they actually sit you down and tell you directly what you need to know. It’s only a theory, and my poor ass has no way of proving it. But there’s got to be some explanation for dyslexic lacrosse players getting engineering degrees from these types of schools when it’s unheard of elsewhere…</p>
<p>I’ve wondered this same thing. </p>
<p>Perhaps (not an engineer) the overall material covered is the same at the two school extremes, but the depth and speed at which that material is covered couldn’t possibly be the same.</p>
<p>“depth and speed at which that material is covered couldn’t possibly be the same”</p>
<p>Agreed. In the workforce i’ve talked with several fellow engineers about “college days” and have noticed two things when comparing my schooling to theirs. 1) they didn’t get into topics with nearly as much depth as I was exposed to and 2) what they did in a senior design class i did my sophmore year. So at harder schools I believe they expect a lot more from the students, in terms of grasping topics and retention, and therefore make labs, exams, and hw that much harder. But this of course is why the larger companies seek out these students first.</p>
<p>vblick: Which school did you attend?</p>
<p>Georgia Tech</p>
<p>students at weaker schools deal with engineering just like how students there deal with math/physics/sciences. From what I have seen, </p>
<ol>
<li><p>the textbooks are the same, which misleads many people from weaker schools to think that their school is just as hard as MIT.</p></li>
<li><p>professors don’t derive equations all day, because very few students at the best schools understand them, students at weaker schools have a even tougher time. Instead, instead of understanding where formulas come from, they tell you to just accept it as is, and use it.—> Which for 99% of the engineering profession is fine, might be even better, because u get to understand the application better, and the profs explain problem solving techniques more.</p></li>
<li><p>Although the textbooks are the same, the problems assigned are not the same. Weaker schools sometimes go through and assign the first 1-10 questions in each section of the textbook as homework, while harder schools will expect you to connect the dots and make some new dots by giving you the challenging problems in the back of the book. This requires a higher level of understanding of the concepts.</p></li>
<li><p>Upper level engineering classes: at a weaker school, say you are asked to construct a computer model of an artificial tissue, they probably will ask you to use some existing model to fit parameters and find the constants. at a tougher school, they might ask you to choose a tissue, choose the appropriate model, or modify the model as you see fit, and then explain why, and present your results. At the tougher schools, upper level classes are more like half research/half learned.</p></li>
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<p>I have never understood why people think that just because their course is called the same thing, or they’re in the same major, difficulty will be equal across universities. I have a friend (in engineering) who failed out of MIT <em>twice</em> who is at the top of the class in their current (also engineering-focused) school.</p>
<p>There is no way difficulty between the top schools and the next tier is comparable.</p>
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<p>…or to program a solver for the tissue in Matlab using computational modules that you’ve been developing from scratch.</p>
<p>I still get headaches remembering how I had to write my own finite element computational engine in grad school… Getting the stupid models to work is tricky enough when you’re using ABAQUS or something and you know what you’re doing, but building it up from nothing… <em>shudder</em>.</p>