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<p>Because at a certain point, it’s a bunch of random nonsense you’re spouting on paper, and doing better should be a little better correlated with learning the stuff properly.</p>
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<p>Or the exam is too poorly designed. I don’t think “too hard” matters at all, since everything is relative. But when “too hard” starts to mean that everyone finds it ridiculous and is spouting whatever nonsense possible to gain some points, it’s a little silly. And it is absolutely true that some courses end up being run like this. I don’t see the point of it myself, and neither do many engineering students.</p>
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<p>Yet what you learn ought to have some correlation with what you may be doing on the job. Keep in mind that we are talking about engineering degrees, which are supposed to be professional degrees, and (with the exception of BioE at Berkeley) are ABET-certified programs, the implication of which is that - as sentimentGX4 stated - you may indeed be confronted on the job with a hazardous situation in which you ought to know what you’re doing. Yet engineering exams often times devolves into little more than a glorified game of speed-chess, but with equations instead of knights and bishops. Again, nobody actually goes around frantically deriving long sequences of equations on the actual job. </p>
<p>One serious problem this entails is that the program selects the wrong people. Many people who might otherwise be perfectly capable engineers are excluded from the program simply because they can’t do fast math - a skill that you don’t really need to do the job. Conversely, what you do have are ‘engineers’ who are little more than applied math majors. Engineering knowledge should be measured on whether you can build and design technical products, not whether you can simply solve math. </p>
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<p>The problem is that it prepares you poorly for the actual job. Engineering students are inculcated in a system where mistakes are not only tolerated, but actually inevitable - many (probably most) engineering students having never even once scored 100% on any of their engineering exams - to a workplace where even one mistake could be dangerous. That’s a significant culture shock that few engineering students are properly prepared for. </p>
<p>But the more pernicious problem is that it fosters a sense of cynicism and despair. When you know that even the best students are still going to make significant mistakes on wide swaths of any given exam, and you will earn a top grade simply by making fewer mistakes than most others even if that still means making plenty of mistakes, then the system degenerates into a silly game of point scoring. Students inevitably realize that what they need to do to score maximum exam points have nothing to do with the actual engineering job, and the only goal is simply to survive.</p>
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<p>I agree wholeheartedly – I think while fundamental classes should introduce the derivations and have one understand them properly, the more advanced classes should prepare one for real work. </p>
<p>Do you have in mind a particular branch of engineering you think fails especially badly at this in terms of Cal’s departments? My impression has been at least computer engineering classes are brutally practical, and have one do lots of improvisation while churning out results to hard projects. Depending on the EE classes, there is a huge practical component, entailing projects. And the one advanced EE class I sat in on was practical even in the examinations, in that it was a lot of conceptual stuff (taking equations into account not even just to answer simple questions but also to think about what assumptions are involved in writing the equations, relative to the real world, etc). In short, it was far from straightforward, and very research-minded. But again, this was an advanced, specialized class whose primary purpose was to give basic training for potential researchers.</p>
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<p>I always felt that in a CS class for instance, the exams should be of minimal weight, and some of my very CS-savvy acquaintances seem to think so too. The projects really ought to be where it counts.</p>
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<p>Someone who might very much endorse this concern is rocketDA from the HMC threads, who believed he knows almost if not precisely no awesome real life engineers with a 3.7+ GPA from HMC, but certainly a decent number with lower.</p>
<p>I don’t know how true all of this is, but I have to say it sounds plausible to me, if I look at the engineers I know, because some of the really good ones (as in at actual design) even have the capability of doing fast math simply because they’re sharp, but don’t study excessive hours for engineering exams since they don’t believe it’s worth the effort, and thus have decent GPAs, no more.</p>
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<p>I don’t know about a particular branch as it relates to departments, but I can certainly nominate a particular topic: thermodynamics, which to this day, is still the biggest ‘mind screw’ within any engineering curriculum - perhaps more so than even quantum mechanics (which most engineers don’t take anyway). To this day, other than perhaps in academia, I have yet to meet a single engineer - including many with PhD’s - who believes they truly understand thermodynamics, and especially the mathematics behind thermodynamics, to the point that an entire cottage industry of bloggers/authors exist who write tracts trying to correct misconceptions of thermodynamics (which then begs the question of why current engineering students aren’t assigned those blogs and articles rather than the utterly baffling thermodynamics textbooks). Yet even so, confusion about even the most basic thermodynamics terms is utterly pervasive. For example, how many engineers actually understand that entropy and disorder are not the same thing, and actually know what the difference is between the two? How many engineers actually understand that entropy, strictly defined, has nothing to do with energy, temperature, or heat flow? How many engineers actually understand that entropy is specific to the observer - in the sense that a thermodynamic system that has very low (or even zero) entropy with respect to me may have very large entropy with respect to you? </p>
<p>But instead of having students understand these deeply fundamental notions (which, despite being fundamental, are nevertheless surely misunderstood by the overwhelming majority of engineers), engineering thermodynamics courses inevitably degenerate into a long slog of recondite mathematical equations that not only leaves the students baffled, but has nothing to do with the actual job. </p>
<p>As a case in point, consider the Maxwell Relations. Simply take the first one listed: that the partial derivative of temperature with respect to volume at constant entropy is equal to the negative of the partial of pressure with entropy at constant volume, and both are equal to the double partial of internal energy with entropy & volume. </p>
<p>[Maxwell</a> relations - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell_relations]Maxwell”>Maxwell relations - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>What the heck does that mean? To this day, I have not encountered a single engineer who knows what that actually means in any real-world sense. Note, it has nothing to do with the math, as many engineering students - if perhaps not practicing engineers - can solve the math. But what does the math actually mean? Does anybody in the real world actually go around calculating, or even caring what the double partial derivative of internal energy w.r.t. entropy and volume is? </p>
<p>And those are some of the more basic mathematics of thermodynamics. Even more perplexing are the Bridgman’s Equations. I defy anybody to take the last Bridgman’s Equation and tell me how to use it in any real-world engineering setting.</p>
<p>[Bridgman’s</a> thermodynamic equations - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgman’s_thermodynamic_equations]Bridgman’s”>Bridgman's thermodynamic equations - Wikipedia) </p>
<p>Hence, engineering thermodynamics exams inevitably devolve into a dazed forced march of endless mathematical calculations. You don’t know what you’re actually calculating. You don’t know why you’re calculating it. And you don’t have time to find out. All you know is that you either need to do the mathematics, or you fail the class.</p>
<p>I agree mostly with you regarding the exams (keeping in mind I haven’t started at Berkeley engineering yet, and I really get a kick out of difficult exams).</p>
<p>The one thing I don’t agree with is your constant reference to the “actual job” that engineers do. Engineers have such a variety of jobs they can pursue that you can’t make it overly vocational. In hazardous situations, I can only hope that the engineers would be trained for that specific job. You don’t get an engineering degree so that right when you graduate you have all of the knowledge to do a job.</p>
<p>At least I’m getting an engineering degree because I am interested in all of the material and I’m extremely interested in all of the possible paths I can go into with that knowledge. You may not apply all of the concepts, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn them. For example, I wouldn’t not take Quantum Mechanics, even if I don’t pursue research in quantum computing.</p>
<p>So, what I’m trying to say is that I’d definitely want to preserve the balance of theoretical and practical. I agree that practicality is a lot of what engineering is about, but without the theoretical side it wouldn’t be nearly as enjoyable, imo. </p>
<p>Sorry I just really dislike the idea of learning to get a job. I can’t imagine wanting to go to college to get a job. I’m going to college because I want to learn about things I’m passionate about, and I will go into a career that interests me, definitely not so I can get a good job, so that I can have lots of money, etc…</p>
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<p>I think what Sakky means is that you should have a choice whether you want to understand the overly theoretical stuff.</p>
<p>Sakky, my impression is this is probably a bigger problem in some varieties of engineering than others, since honestly folks I know seem to be getting by without having to take classes like that, but I only know folks in a certain subset of the engineering majors. I think the theory is important to be taught, because if not the majority of practicing engineers, theory is still something some will end up using, but it needn’t be forced on everyone in a field like engineering.</p>
<p>I think some basic derivations that teach conceptual understanding of things that are important to actual engineering are important, and this includes some physics, but certainly not crazy amounts of theory, which frankly, as a mathematician, I can say a lot of folks in engineering will be unable to understand without more sophisticated mathematics. I.e. I particularly agree with</p>
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<p>Unfortunately, the physics and mathematics needed to understand certain things is vastly beyond the scope of an engineering class, and I agree that manipulating symbols is a foolish thing to emphasize.</p>
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<p>Perhaps because you’ve done well on them, and presumably will continue to do so. But what about those students who don’t do well on them? In particular, what about those students who perform poorly on the exams, but could still be perfectly competent engineers? The system forces out people because they don’t know things that, frankly, they don’t actually need to know to do the job. As a case in point, if you don’t know how to calculate and derive the Maxwell Relations, you will surely fail the required thermodynamics course, despite the fact that I have never once met a single engineer outside of academia that actually uses the Maxwell Relations on the job. </p>
<p>Keep in mind that I am hardly ‘soft’ on the matter of stringency of the discipline. I agree that certain material needs to be imparted, and those students who cannot understand that material should not be allowed to graduate with engineering degrees (or, better yet, should never have been admitted to the engineering programs in the first place). But that material should regard topics that working engineers actually use. </p>
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<p>Nobody is advocating that you can ever have all of the knowledge to do the job immediately upon graduation. But you should still know some of it as part of your required courses, and those required courses should not include material that you don’t really need to know for the actual job. See below. </p>
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<p>Yet you have to admit that many (probably most) engineering students are majoring in engineering in order to have a job. Surely we would all agree that if engineering majors did not garner such relatively high starting salaries, far fewer students would major in engineering. </p>
<p>Hence, I have always advocated an approach with far greater flexibility regarding electives and relatively few required courses. Those engineering students such as yourself who want to learn deep theory - possibly as the pathway to academia - would be free to do so as part of a wide-ranging selection of electives. Those who are more practically oriented and simply want to design and build practical technologies should be free to do that as their choice of electives. The required courses would include topics that all engineers would actually find useful.</p>
<p>As a case in point, I agree that the practical implications of thermodynamics are indeed important for engineers to know. They should understand the Laws of Thermodynamics (especially the mystically complex 2nd Law), how an engine or heat pump actually works, and perhaps some basic information on the thermodynamics of chemical mixing and reactions. But the actual derivations from first principles could be left for the theoretical elective that students are welcome but not required to take. </p>
<p>We should also keep in mind that the distinguishing feature of engineering is its practicality. We already have math and physics departments. Those students who really want to learn theoretical math or physics are welcome to major in those subjects, perhaps even as part of a double with engineering. {For example, any engineering student who truly wants to learn the theoretical basis of thermodynamics should take Physics 112 where they would learn more than they ever wanted to know.} If the engineering major is simply a glorified physics or math major, then, to put it bluntly, it really has no reason to exist.</p>
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<p>Thermodynamics is one of those subjects whose underpinnings are so abstruse as to be the subject of ridicule. As Arnold Sommerfeld once famously joked:</p>
<p>Thermodynamics is a funny subject. The first time you go through it, you don’t understand it at all. The second time you go through it, you think you understand it, except for one or two small points. The third time you go through it, you know you don’t understand it, but by that time you are so used to it, it doesn’t bother you any more.</p>
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<p>Yet manipulating symbols is inevitable. Apart from the concept of entropy - which is readily calculated but which likely only a tiny fraction of nonacademic engineers understand what it actually is - there are seemingly mundane quantities such as “free energy” that are readily calculated but which practically nobody in industry actually understands what it really is. </p>
<p>To those who would disagree, pop quiz: what exactly is “free” about '“free energy”? It’s not the thermodynamically available energy, it’s certainly not free in the financial sense, as you almost always have to pay to obtain more free energy, so what exactly is it? (Note, this has nothing to do with the mathematical definition of free energy, which we all know is found by simply subtracting the quantity TdS from some form of energy, either internal energy or enthalpy. But I can take any quantity and arbitrarily add or subtract a bunch of random terms to it. To specifically take energy/enthalpy and then specifically subtract TdS should produce some quantity that has some useful form that is readily understandable by the engineering students who are forced to learn how to calculate it, so what exactly is it? I defy anybody to pick a random selection of practicing engineers, or even engineering students, and ask them what free energy actually is, and I suspect that not one of them will know.}</p>
<p>Sakky, I’ve been looking at this, and you make some sense when I think about what was said by a disgruntled student in the Georgia Tech (as you may know, this program is also known to be extremely rigorous and since it’s all engineering and science, the average grad. gpa is not quite 3.1 yet) discussion threads. He basically said that he hated the school, because it simply worked the students to death, and had many extremely difficult exams/classes with no real life applications, and that getting through Tech was merely a matter of being “obedient”. This sounds similar to what you are describing to some extent.</p>