<p>The simple facts of the matter are that Engineering fails more people, has a lower average grade, has smarter students entering, has more credit hours for graduation, and has more assigned work (thank god, it brings the grades up). There is no subjectivity on exams. Just brutal reality.</p>
<p>Has there been an English exam in the history of college that had an average of 12%? There has been in Engineering. Have there been English classes that give Ds/Fs to 66% of the class? I doubt it</p>
<p>Calculus is like a pair of glasses. Without it, you can’t really see what’s around you. Most students don’t learn calculus. They learn how to mechanically integrate and differentiate, with little understanding of how to apply these concepts, and the deeper ideas behind them.</p>
<p>If you study calculus carefully, and then study some physics carefully, and study some probability theory carefully, and study some linear algebra carefully, and then take a few days off to think very carefully what all this means, you will slowly come to realize something wonderful. Something so wonderful that many people who pursue engineering/science pursue it to get more of this feeling.</p>
<p>This is the feeling of knowing how the world works. </p>
<p>People wonder, why would someone study theoretical mathematics for the sake of theoretical mathematics. Let us look to fourier and laplace. Thanks to the insights of these mathematicians, we have fourier and laplace transforms. (Laplace is a generalization of fourier). </p>
<p>Then an electrical engineer came along, and tried to figure out clever ways to send signals across a wire, and then through a vacuum (via radio). And he found Fourier’s work, and he realized, hey this mathematics by Fourier can be applied here, and now I can think in the frequency domain. And over an iterative process, we learned how to send signals over radio. And by the same process we learned how to build so many of the crazy things we have today, as well as master our environment. </p>
<p>We live in a culture where we tell kids to go do what they want. The problem is that most kids haven’t even had the chance to see what’s available. Most kids never even get to see the beauty and elegance of engineering disciplines such as electrical engineering before they make up their mind that science and math are boring.</p>
<p>“This is the feeling of knowing how the world works.” </p>
<p>I must disagree. To know “how the world works” will require an understanding on the socio-economic culture within different societies and how such cultures were shaped by their history. We are far from being inanimated objects within a physical world. I am sure that many societies train more scientists/engineers on a per capita basis but are you sure that you want to live in one of those societies. Pakistan, anyone?</p>
<p>padad, statistics do not support your contention that “many” humanity majors take advanced mathematics courses. The enrollment figures from one top 3 LAC indicated that each semester there are an average of 60 seats filled in courses beyond mv calc. or about 2.9% of the student population. Eliminate the math/physics/chem majors and few if any are occupied by humanities majors. However you are correct in that some econ majors also take up math as a second major or minor. </p>
<p>By comparison, at OSU this term about 3.5%(1248 seats) of the student body enrolled in advanced math courses geared toward math/sci/eng majors. So here to it seems that few if any humanities majors are enrolled in these advanced math courses.</p>
<p>Curmudge your dander has gotten riled up here. But I reject the notion that our brightest students gravitate to science and engineering disciplines too and it would not be a good thing if they did.</p>
<p>I want great minds in all fields!! I want to be inspired by a great sculpture, book and economic theory as well as a great bridge, next generation iphone and space program.</p>
<p>o’loog my dander is just fine. No riling here. I am poking fun at the idiocy being esposed by the gent saying that foreign students come to our schools not because they are good but because they are easy. That’s crap and I sure hope you don’t believe that. The superiority of a French college degree? Please.</p>
<p>BTW the post you are thinking of was only directed to those who are posting the nonsense above. It had nothing to do with the “engineering students are better, smarter, better looking” debate (or any of the others) , just the foreign student at the U.S. school part. I should have been more clear.</p>
<p>“The sheer difficult of engineering programs would suggest that the students in those programs are, on average, (not every single case, but on average) of higher intelligence than others.”</p>
<p>I’m a bit bemused by this, as well as the claim that the fact that 66% of the students in an engineering class got Ds and Fs proves they are smarter. I would say that such a statistic may show that you NEED to be smarter to succeed in engineering, but in that class, 66% of the students weren’t smart enough. But here’s a genuine question: what is it that makes engineering curricula so hard? Is it that the material is difficult to understand, or that there is a great deal of material to learn? Personally, I found foreign languages to be among the hardest subjects because there was so much material to learn (i.e., the gender of a zillion French nouns). The seminar on Wallace Stevens was hard because his poetry is hard to understand. My calculus course was hard because the textbook was lousy and the TA who taught it was incomprehensible. I can remember that some Political Science classes were hard because there was a ton of reading. So why is engineering hard?</p>
<p>“Personally, I found foreign languages to be among the hardest subjects because there was so much material to learn (i.e., the gender of a zillion French nouns).”</p>
<p>Yep. Try elementary Chinese or Japanese. I’ll take the Pepsi challenge between intro Japanese (for a native English or Romance-language speaker) and any other intro class you can name.</p>
<p>Yes that’s all wonderful for you, but it has nothing to do with me. Enjoy what you enjoy but that doesn’t mean everyone else has to enjoy it or feel inferior for not seeing the world that way.</p>
<p>Well I guess I should have clarified what I meant by “how the world works.” You are absolutely right that the human factor plays a very important role. That’s why it’s very clear that we have both engineering students and non-engineering students (sorry idk what to call them, social sciences/arts/philosophy students? you know what I mean). </p>
<p>But it’s also very obvious that the world we live in is largely shaped by science and technology. Every civilization needs a big base that studies and understands this technical infrastructure we base our society on. </p>
<p>The point of my argument (and this is to tsdad as well) was to show what calculus can do for you. Seeing how the human factor and social sciences affects our world is more immediate for people because… well we are humans, and we are social animals that interact with each other a lot. But seeing what science technology can show us is not so easily done, because it takes some time to build up a background.</p>
<p>differential: I wish you had been around for my “What’s So Great About Calculus?” thread, since your answer would clearly have been quite beautiful. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite do the trick for me, because it reads like a generic description of a mystical experience without communicating how the content of THAT mystical experience differs from any other mystical experience.</p>
<p>There’s no question that I am a humanities person, but I have oodles of respect for engineers, physicists, and the like. Some of my best friends, etc. As a group, they’re not generically smarter than other smart people, not by a long shot. Some are, some aren’t, just like any other group. (I bridle a bit at the suggestion that I couldn’t have handled college math or engineering. In 12 years of math through AP Calculus at pretty good schools, I never got less than the top grade. I liked math fine. But I never saw the point of most of the math I learned after 8th grade, unless I wanted to be an engineer, which I didn’t.)</p>
<p>As for the IQs of engineers vs. art historians, I think you guys have it completely backwards. There are probably a few thousand people, max, in the world, who are able to support themselves above a subsistence level as art historians or closely related professions, who really qualify as “art historians”. The sieve in that profession is incredibly fine, and practically every one of the people who gets through it is extraordinary in many ways, including intellectually. There are millions of engineers. Many of them are not extraordinary. I don’t think anyone who has dealt with, say, Vin Scully or Meyer Schapiro or Camille Paglia or Michel Foucault (whose most important book was largely art history) thinks that any of them was missing anything in the IQ department.</p>
I responded to that. My experience and that of my D are my two data points and I can assure you she and I have never felt threatened by the superiority of foreign students in the classroom.</p>
<p>curmudge, sorry for the misunderstanding. I do not always read all the posts as was the case in this instance. And I am finding this bickering between engineering and the liberal arts to be silly. Its not a zero sum game we are dealing with here.</p>
<p>I too would challenge the notion that US colleges are inferior to their foreign counterparts by comparing US/foreign educated students in our graduate program. There is no discernable difference with one cohort or the other in my experience.</p>
<p>Speaking from my experience as an Asian Studies undergrad who took his electives in science, math, and symbolic logic (my favorite), what makes science hard is that “it takes some time to build up a background”. Why is Chinese/ Japanese hard? It also takes time to build up a background. Music performance would have been hard too, had it not for the fact that parents send them for music lessons long before they started college.</p>
<p>In my opinion, students are simply taking the easy way out. Why kill yourself when you can coast? Subjects like science, math, foreign languages require long periods of study and practice to gain proficiency. They tend to require mastery at a lower level before moving on to a higher level. In short, you must be prepared to submerge yourself in the subject in order to do well. Most people, let alone students, are not likely to want to do that.</p>
<p>When I was in high school, my Italian classmates were beating me in French and nothing else. They also tend to major in French if they were going to college. It took me a long time to realize the advantage they had over me was that they speak a romance language at home.</p>
<p>Why is engineering difficult? I think it is difficult on two levels. First there is the cumulative nature of math and science. Secondly there is the heavy class load associated with the discipline. In my D2 's school, the most demanding course of study is engineering physics. Those poor devils had to deal with a complex discipline like physics while handling a workload of an engineer. I know I would not do it.</p>
<p>“But it’s also very obvious that the world we live in is largely shaped by science and technology”</p>
<p>???</p>
<p>You and I must live in a separate worlds. In my world, we cherish the ideals that underly our form of government, philosophy, our art and culture. Science and technologies are tools that we use. We master them for our convenience but we can certainly do without them. BTW, I am a scientist, with MD/PhD degrees, and some of my colleagues even think I made some meaningful contributions.</p>
<p> but we can certainly do without them ??? I guess we do live on different planets. Are you trying to get rid of the majority of the jobs held by people in the modern world or something? I find mine something of a convenience, at the moment. It sure beats growing corn (not that I have enough room to grow corn, what with all the space that will be taken up by the cow and chickens. Not to mention the horse and buggy. And the yard will be a wreck now that we have to dig a well they just don’t make city lots as big as they used to. Oh well, at least some people like the well diggers still have a job, even though they’re not too happy without their power tools and machinery. I hope they accept eggs for payment? ;)</p>
<p>A guy walks in for his first day of work. His boss hands him a broom and orders him to sweep the floor. The guy says, “I don’t think you understand. I just graduated from a prestigious small liberal arts school.” The boss turns around and says, “Oh, well then I better show you how to sweep the floor.” </p>
<p>The joke assumes that the purpose of college is the antiquated trade-school model where one learns a practical and specific skill. But one can read against the grain of the joke and ask what a liberal arts education strives to be. Yes, it is true, it is not about teaching a specific skill or how to make an end product so to speak. Instead it provides skills to address most any task, skills such as communicating, analyzing and well, just how to “think” so to speak. </p>
<p>In an ever changing world where today’s profession may be equated next year with the buggy whip, the value of a good liberal arts education should not be dismissed.</p>