<p>Why is it that engineering courses have to be so harshly graded, and why is it that professors make it so much harder to do well in them when the humanities professors seem to give out higher grades and humanities courses in general have higher grade averages than science/engineering courses.</p>
<p>Ideas?</p>
<p>Because no one dies if an anthropologist makes a mistake?</p>
<p>The PLANTS do!!!</p>
<p>What do plants have anything to do with anthropology?</p>
<p>Well, how people “used” plants.</p>
<p>Doctors kill their clients one at a time. Engineers have the capacity to be far more efficient.</p>
<p>Hands over face LOL</p>
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<p>Well, I’ll put to y’all this way. Hitler, in his early life, was a struggling artist. Stalin (ironically) studied religion in college to become a priest. Mao Tse Tung studied literature and philosophy. Lenin studied humanities and law. All of these guys devised ideologies that killed millions of people. </p>
<p>The truth of the matter is that if you want to look at disciplines in the manner of life and death, far and away the most important discipline is philosophy. A philosophical idea is the most powerful force on Earth, as history has proven that a particular philosophy really can cause millions of people to die.</p>
<p>You ask a good question. To turn it around, the question might be why are humanities professors allowed to get away with not rigorously grading their students.</p>
<p>The value of someone’s ideas, both written in prose, and expressed in contributions to class discussions, is more subjectively evaluated than determining to what extent a math problem is done correctly or incorrectly. IMO that should not relieve humanities professors of their obligation to make those distinctions. But in practice evidently some of them can get away with not making them, so they do. Because it makes their job easier and results in higher teacher evaluations for them.</p>
<p>In most math-oriented courses the grading is more black & white, so it’s easier to do. This doesn’t fully address your question though.</p>
<p>I agree with monydad where in engineering grading is far more objective than in arts subjects. We have discussed this in another post, but I think in engineering/science it is harder to pass your courses but easier to distinguish oneself because of the objective grading. Arts on the other hand is easier to pass but harder to do well. it is my impression that the grading is more subjective. </p>
<p>At a more fundamental level, I think what you are asking is why is engineering so difficult. It is difficult because the role of universities is less oriented on job training than it is on developing knowledge through research. This, in theory, is what distinguishes an engineer from a technician and a university from a technical school. </p>
<p>I took chemical engineering and many of my profs were brilliant at fluid mech, chemical reactions, thermo etc, but most had only academic training. Few had real, design or operations experience. Put them in the “real world” and most would flounder. This is why i think co-op education is so important to show employers that you have experience to bridge that gap between theory and practise.</p>
<p>The difference between killing people with philosophy and killing people with engineering is that killing people with philosophy requires intent, whereas killing people with an exceedingly trivial error in engineering requires merely carelessness. Hitler didn’t cause a holocaust because he was careless.</p>
<p>Engineering requires mastery of complex concepts. These concepts are based upon other complex concepts, which are based upon other complex concepts, etc. etc. etc. Mastery of the highest level concepts requires mastery of all the foundation concepts, as well, and in order to be a good engineer, it’s essential that you be rigorous in learning and mastering all of those other concepts. Engineering professors have a very direct and obvious responsibility to society to prepare their students well. The role of Hitler’s philosophy professors in the manifestation of the Holocaust is highly, highly debateable, but if an engineering professor doesn’t teach you about lateral torsional failure and people die as a result, that’s directly traceable. </p>
<p>There was a kid in my steel design class that I TA’d at U of I that should’ve failed. Flat-out didn’t do the work, when he did, it was horrendously obvious that he didn’t know what he was doing. He shouldn’t have passed, and I told the prof that he shouldn’t have passed. The prof curved the grade up, and the kid got a C-, and graduated.</p>
<p>I guarantee you that if I’d TA’d a linguistics class or even a math class, I’d have just said, “Well, that kid got a lucky break. Whatever,” and I’d have forgotten all about it.</p>
<p>This was an engineering course, though, and I haven’t forgotten. I still know that kid’s name. I still know what grade he got. It still bothers me, not because I’m out to “get” the kid or anything, but because it really worries me that there’s a kid running around out there with an ABET-accredited degree from the top civ eng undergrad program in the nation and he doesn’t know the first thing about designing a beam, and I had a part in it. He’ll never pass the PE unless he shapes up, though, and that knowledge is what keeps the situation from driving me nuts.</p>
<p>I know that other engineering professors feel the same way I do. I <em>certainly</em> know that other engineers feel the same way I do. Hunt down an interview with Leslie Robertson some time, and look into that guy’s eyes. His office still overlooks Ground Zero, and though he didn’t have any part in flying those planes into the towers, that guy’s still majorly tortured about the design flaws that brought those buildings down. That man will never be the same. Other engineers see that, and engineering professors understand that they need to prepare us for the reality and gravity of the profession. We do the job because we love the job, we love what we do, but you can’t deny the responsibility involved.</p>
<p>"There was a kid in my steel design class that I TA’d at U of I that should’ve failed. Flat-out didn’t do the work, when he did, it was horrendously obvious that he didn’t know what he was doing. He shouldn’t have passed, and I told the prof that he shouldn’t have passed. The prof curved the grade up, and the kid got a C-, and graduated.</p>
<p>I guarantee you that if I’d TA’d a linguistics class or even a math class, I’d have just said, “Well, that kid got a lucky break. Whatever,” and I’d have forgotten all about it.</p>
<p>This was an engineering course, though, and I haven’t forgotten. I still know that kid’s name. I still know what grade he got. It still bothers me, not because I’m out to “get” the kid or anything, but because it really worries me that there’s a kid running around out there with an ABET-accredited degree from the top civ eng undergrad program in the nation and he doesn’t know the first thing about designing a beam, and I had a part in it. He’ll never pass the PE unless he shapes up, though, and that knowledge is what keeps the situation from driving me nuts.</p>
<p>I know that other engineering professors feel the same way I do. I <em>certainly</em> know that other engineers feel the same way I do. Hunt down an interview with Leslie Robertson some time, and look into that guy’s eyes. His office still overlooks Ground Zero, and though he didn’t have any part in flying those planes into the towers, that guy’s still majorly tortured about the design flaws that brought those buildings down. That man will never be the same. Other engineers see that, and engineering professors understand that they need to prepare us for the reality and gravity of the profession. We do the job because we love the job, we love what we do, but you can’t deny the responsibility involved."</p>
<p>I would have done the same thing. I pretty much mind my own business and don’t care what people do, but when it comes to something that could put the lives of others in danger that is when you have take immediate action. There was nothing wrong about you to “snitching” on this kid, because what you did was at worst ethical.</p>
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<p>To this day, the Chinese Communist Party insists that they didn’t “know” that millions of people were dying of starvation during the Great Leap Forward. Now, whether it’s because they’re just lying, or whether it’s because they didn’t want to know the truth, at the end of the day, millions of Chinese still died. </p>
<p>Or, to give you another example, I suspect that Karl Marx never intended to kill anybody. Nevertheless people like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao used his philosophy as justification to kill millions. </p>
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<p>Well, let me give you another analogy then. A bus driver can kill hundreds of people through a fraction of a second of sheer carelessness. Somebody who is just learning how to fly a plane (but hasn’t even obtained his pilot’s license) can careless fly his plane into a building just like what happened on 9/11 or what recently happened to Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle and potentially kill thousands of people. Every chemical plant, oil refinery, and oil drilling platform I’ve ever visited has had some potential for some plant worker, most of whom have just a high school education, to carelessly leave some valve open or switch on some manifold that could potentially cause an explosion and release of poisonous fumes, killing everybody in sight. Heck, they let almost anybody with half-a-brain in this country drive a car and buy a gun. Carelessness with cars and with firearms can and has caused widespread death. </p>
<p>Hence, I think that the notion that engineering profs are somehow ‘protecting’ the public from death is a huge smokescreen. Medical school exists to train doctors who have express responsibilities of life and death. But medical school isn’t graded hard. Not even close. Medical school grading is quite reasonable, and basically everybody is going to graduate. You may not get the residency that you want, but you know you’re going to graduate. Medical schools can do this because they are highly selective about who gets admitted to med-school in the first place, coupled with the fact that merely graduating from med-school does not automatically license you to practice medicine. You still have to complete at the very least one more year of supervised interning before you can obtain a license, and most doctors obtain a formal license only after many years of supervised residency work. Engineering could have been structured this way. </p>
<p>And besides, let’s face it, the vast majority of engineers do not deal with anything involving life and death anyway. If you’re a software gaming engineer developing the next version of Grand Theft Auto, and the game is shipped with bugs, honestly, so what? Nobody is going to die. Similarly, if you’re designing Apple Ipods, and they break too often, then again, honestly, who cares? Let’s face it. The vast majority of engineers are building consumer goods or other such discretionary purchases in which nobody is going to die if the products don’t work. If you’re designing software for MySpace and you accidentally lock out a bunch of people from their accounts, who cares? So I can PERHAPS see the need for harsh grading for CivE’s, BME’s, AeroE’s and maybe ChemE’s. But why do things like CS and EE also have to be harshly graded too, when the fact is, only a tiny fraction of CS and EE guys work on mission-critical projects? Why exactly does IEOR have to be harshly graded? </p>
<p>Furthermore, even the entire premise of harsh grading is highly flawed, for several reasons. First off, grading standards are different from school to school. A guy who flunked out of engineering at MIT (or presumably also UIUC) might have easily graduated in engineering from a no-name school. Hence, these no-name schools are pumping out lots of engineers who the higher-end schools would have deemed unworthy. For example, a no-name 4th tier school like Arkansas State is conferring plenty of ABET engineering degrees upon some people who, frankly, aren’t that good, and some of these graduates may end up working on mission-critical projects. So what about the public safety implications of that? The truth is many of the top schools are not flunking people out because they are truly not worthy of being engineers. Rather, they are flunking people out because they are not worthy of earning engineering degrees FROM THAT PARTICULAR TOP SCHOOL. That’s a big difference there. It’s one thing for UIUC to say to a person that he can’t be an engineer at all. It’s quite another thing for UIUC to say that a person that he just can’t hold an engineering degree from UIUC. </p>
<p>Secondly, even those students who do well are not necessarily the ones we should allow to become engineers. Let’s face it. What you learn in engineering courses and what you actually do as a practicing engineer are two different things. I know plenty of “academic engineers”, meaning people who are really good at passing engineering tests because they’re very good at math, but who are people who should probably never be trusted to work as a real engineer. I remember some people who were at the top of their class as chemical engineers visibly recoiling during a field trip to see a real live chemical plant, and it was quite clear that they didn’t really want to be there. These guys had no intention of actually working as engineers - and as it turned out, these guys ended up doing other things (i.e. investment banking, management consulting, going to law school, etc.) These guys were getting top grades in ChemE because they are supersmart guys who are good at math, but it was quite clear that they didn’t really ever want to work as engineers. I wouldn’t trust these guys to actually work as engineers, because it’s quite clear to me that they never really wanted to do the actual day-to-day work of an engineer.</p>
<p>So if the engineering profession “really” cared about public safety, here is what ought to happen:</p>
<p>1) Get rid of all of those no-name, low-tier schools that are nonetheless ABET accredited. Or at least, force them to raise their standards. The truth is, these schools turn out a good number of graduates of dubious ability. Like I’ve said many times, it’s not that hard to to get an ABET-accredited engineering degree from a no-name school. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of ABET-accredited no-name schools out there. </p>
<p>2) Institute harsh grading only in those particular classes that have to do with topics that involve public safety. Let’s use Berkeley as an example. Why exactly does Math 1B (Calculus) have to be a weeder? Not everybody who is in Math 1B is an engineer. There are also plenty of math majors, Physics majors, and so forth. If some math major doesn’t learn Math 1B well such that he screws up a proof later on in life, so what? Nobody is going to die. Why does CS 61B (software data structures) have to be a weeder? Most CS grads will never work on mission-critical projects, but will rather work on consumer goods (i.e. video games, Internet sites, software for the Ipod). </p>
<p>3) Make sure that the classes that you require are actually NECESSARY. Again, let’s use Berkeley as an example, and specifically let’s talk about EE. Why do EE people have to take the weeder of CS 61B? The truth is, if you’re studying EE, you don’t really need to know software data structures. It’s nice to know that stuff, but you don’t really need to know more than, say, the first few chapters of the book (and I don’t even think you really need that). So why force those guys to take an entire weeder course on something that they don’t need anyway? It’s like saying that we aren’t going to allow you to get a degree in English unless you can pass a course in French. Similarly, ChemE’s don’t really need to know quantum chemistry. Many other examples abound of engineering programs forcing students to take harshly-graded classes about things that they don’t really need to know.</p>
<p>4) Instead of giving somebody a bad grade, how about just not giving them a grade at all? Pretend as if the person had never taken the class at all. He doesn’t get a grade, but he also doesn’t get credit for the class. That way, you still aren’t giving the person an engineering degree, but the guy’s transcript is unmarred such that he can still transition to some other discipline if he wants. </p>
<p>Right now, as it stands, engineering is a high-risk affair. Trying engineering can actually make you WORSE off than doing nothing at all. If you try engineering and flunk out, not only will you not get an engineering degree, but your chances of entering many other fields is now impaired. For example, getting tagged with a bunch of bad grades will just kill your chances of going to law school later. Or getting into investment banking or consulting. Or any other fields that consider your GPA. If a guy isn’t cutting it in engineering, fine, get rid of him. But let him pursue another field with a clean slate. Right now, as it stands, it’s better to simply not try engineering at all, then to try it and flunk out. I know people who wish that they had never tried engineering at all, because now they have to deal with a ruined academic transcript for the rest of their life. </p>
<p>5) All engineering paths should implement a strict internship/residency program similar to what doctors have to do through now, where you can’t even practice legally until you have worked under close supervision under another engineer. Right now, there are few legal requirements for employers to hire certified professional engineers, and only for “sign-off” purposes. The majority of engineers (especially in EE and CS) don’t bother with certification because most of their employers don’t need it. In contrast, it is illegal for ANYBODY to practice medicine without a license. We should therefore implement this policy post-haste. For example, we should immediately declare Microsoft and Google to be illegal companies because they have hired all of these “uncertified” software engineers. </p>
<p>And from a public policy perspective, if we are REALLY so concerned about public safety, then we as a society ought to implement the following:</p>
<p>1) Make it many times harder for anybody to obtain a driver’s license. Let’s face it. There are a lot of idiots on the road. About 40,000 Americans die from car accidents every year. That’s 13 times the number of people who died on 9/11, and it happens EVERY YEAR. The vast vast majority of car accidents are caused by carelessness. The same holds true for pilot’s licenses, boating licenses, people who want to become bus drivers or train operators, etc. All of these activities can results in deadly accidents.</p>
<p>Not only that, but you vigorously prosecute anybody who performs these activities without a license. For example, the police should be aggressively combing the roads for anybody driving without a license, and those who are caught should immediately be thrown in jail for years, if not decades. After all, these people are endangering the lives of others, right? Heck, perhaps we should implement a system where a car can’t even be started unless somebody inserts a valid driver’s license into a slot in the ignition panel. </p>
<p>2) Institute extremely tough accreditation for operators who want to work in chemical plants, oil refineries, drilling rigs, mines, construction sites. Right now, if you want to be an operator, you don’t need much. Or how about if you want to be a construction worker? Plenty of construction workers have no formal qualifications. A construction worker could accidentally join a beam in the wrong way or make some other boneheaded mistake that later causes the building to collapse. Yet we don’t seem to require any sort accreditation process for construction workers. Why not? The civil engineers can come up with the most structurally sound design in the world, but the workers who are actually building the structure can still accidentally fail to follow the design spec’s. </p>
<p>Now, don’t get me wrong. I personally don’t actually think that ANY of these ideas should be implemented, because they are a violation of the libertarian spirit. But what I am saying is that if public safety was really so important, there is so much low-hanging fruit around. Harsh grading of engineers is probably like 100th on the list of life-saving policies. Like I said, if you want to go around saving lives, the first thing you should do is get rid of all of the incompetent drivers on the road. You should then follow that up with making sure that all of the construction workers and chemical plant/oil refinery operators are competent.</p>
<p>Whatever, dude. We have to work within the existing system. As things are, instead of implementing all those impractical, non-libertarian rules you listed, we’ve just gotta grade tough and weed people out with the PE exam. Check the numbers. Something like 70% of the test-takers get a failing grade.</p>
<p>WRT your example of idiot construction workers: well, that falls under my jurisdiction, too. As a structural engineer, I’ll have to go out and do structural site inspections on my buildings pretty much all the time, as they’re being built. Once again, engineers are the failsafe in the system.</p>
<p>All I can take care of is my little corner of the world. As such, I’m gonna keep concerning myself with the competency of engineers, because having seen a lot of failed structures <em>already</em>, I know how badly engineers can screw things up. That’ll be my little crusade. You can take on the incompetent drivers and idiot refinery/plant operators if you’d like to.</p>
<p>There are other bones to pick with your post, but honestly, I’ve been at a retaining wall collapse all day and I’ve kinda had it with the subject of engineering incompetence for today. I’m whupped.</p>
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<p>This isn’t a legitimate point in any way, shape, or form. The 9/11 thing was a huge plane with professional pilots that was hijacked and The Lidle accident killed 2 people. You have an example where thousands died and an example where someone just learning how to fly was careless, but neither example has both covered.</p>
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<p>We are just simply lucky that we don’t have a case where both examples were covered. But if you want to tell me that it’s impossible for somebody to kill thousands of people by flying a plane into a building, I don’t know what to tell you.</p>
<p>My point is simple. If you want to talk about enacting policies for the purpose of public safety, then let’s really talk about ALL human activities that can potentially endanger public safety. Why does engineering get singled out?</p>
<p>…because this is an ENGINEERING FORUM!!!</p>
<p><em>smacks self in forehead</em></p>
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<p>And don’t you see your implicit self-contradiction? You have managed to conflate tough course grading (which is what I was talking about) with the PE exam (which is not what I was talking about). In fact, the PE exam offers a possible way out. If the PE exam so useful for weeding out bad engineers, then why not just use the PE exam to do all the weeding? After all, we can simply design a PE test that eliminates all of the bad engineers anyway. If the current test is inadequate, then the answer is to then simply design a better test. </p>
<p>This would also solve the problem of those engineers (who are the majority) who have zero interest in becoming professional engineers anyway. If you have no intention of doing PE-style work that has implications to public safety, hen why should you have to be subjected to harsh grading? For example, if all you want to do is get a CS degree so that you can create video games, then why should you be weeded? If you just want to learn EE so that you can build a better Ipod, why should you be weeded? None of these products has anything to do with public safety. Now THAT would be an idea that embraces true libertarianism. People would be free to buy your game or your Ipod, and if it doesn’t work right because you designed it badly, caveat emptor. What weeding does is artificially restrict the number of engineers that are produced beyond the standards that the market demands. It’s simple rent-seeking behavior. </p>
<p>But anyway, fine, have it your way. I leave it up to the peanut gallery to answer. If harsh grading exists for the purpose of enhancing public safety, then why do those engineering students who have no intention of working on mission-critical technologies be weeded? For example, if all you want to do is build consumer electronics, or entertainment software, or any of the other myriad items that have nothing to do with public safety, then why exactly should you be weeded? In other words, just because SOME engineers want to do public safety work, why does EVERY engineering student have to undergo weeding? Why? </p>
<p>Furthermore, why exactly do we have to work within the existing system? Why? This is precisely the sort of fatalism that blocks ANY social change. If people in this country always had this attitude, then African-Americans would still be enslaved, and women would still not have the right to vote. You’ve become an apologist for the current system, just like the US South had plenty of apologists for slavery and Jim Crow. </p>
<p>I’d prefer to say that if something is wrong, we should say that it’s wrong, rather than just fatalistically accepting it as part of the system. Slavery was wrong, and the abolitionists were right to say that it was wrong. Now, I’m certainly not saying that this situation is comparable to slavery, but certainly, the notion of questioning problems of society is a valid notion.</p>
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<p>And I think you just gave away the store when you said that it is your corner of the world that you’re talking about. My question is, why does all of engineering have to be subject to the same rules regarding public safety just because SOME engineers have to deal with that public safety? Like I said, if you are aiming for an engineering job that has nothing to do with public safety? </p>
<p>Specifically, EE (and CS, if you count CS as engineering) is the largest single discipline of all engineering. Most EE’s and CS guys never become PE’s because most of them end up designing consumer goods and thus never need the PE. Yet that doesn’t make EECS grading easy, in fact EECS grading is arguably some of the hardest grading of any college discipline. Again, why? </p>
<p>The PE is something that is generally a big deal only with CivE’s, and to a minor extent with ME’s and ChemE’s. But even plenty of CivE’s have no intention of working on public safety projects, or even working as engineers at all. Of the several MIT Civil Engineers that I know, a bunch of them are in management consulting and a few are investment bankers. They’ve never worked as engineers a single day in their life, and they never intend to become PE’s. </p>
<p>So I think we may have our way out. For those particular people who want to work on projects that have to do with public safety, these people should be made to pass some certification exam. Think of it as the PE exam on steroids. But for everybody else, they should be left alone. </p>
<p>Furthermore, this PE exam on steroids should be an exam that everybody should have to pass, not just new entrants in the field. In other words, if you want to maintain your PE status, you should be made to pass the test every year, not just once. Continuing education requirements don’t really cut it. I’m sure that, right now, there are some long-time PE’s who haven’t done a good job of keeping up their skills and so wouldn’t be able to pass the PE exam of today. What about the public safety danger presented by these guys? By imposing an exam requirement on entrants, but not continuing members, you are simply attempting to reduce the number of members you have to compete with, and this, again, is just simple economic rent-seeking behavior. If the exam is a valid exam, then EVERYBODY, including long-time members, should have to pass it.</p>
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<p>You’re right, this is an engineering forum. Meaning ALL ENGINEERING!!! ALL OF IT!!! Not just those particular engineers who happen to be involved in public safety work. The guys who built the Ipod - they’re engineers. The guys who designed the Xbox - they’re engineers. Are you going to argue that they’re not?</p>
<p>So, aibarr, why are you only talking about YOUR specific subset of engineer? Why not talk about ALL engineers. Why should ALL engineers be weeded out, when only a subject of them do public safety work? Why?</p>