"By not adjusting their grading policies, STEM programs ultimately hurt..the economy"

[noimagination]

<p>

What we need are more top students to try engineering.

Why?

Frankly speaking, I have never encountered a single working engineer (not in academia) who has actually used vector calculus, ODE’s, or PDE’s as a routine part of their job. Heck, I remember one engineering summer intern who was reminding one of the engineers (who held a master’s degree) how to do basic calculus (i.e. how to take a derivative and integral of some trig functions) so that he could help his daughter with her high school math homework. The fact is, engineers don’t actually use that stuff, which is why they don’t remember it.

I’m going to repost a comment I made earlier because it has not been addressed but remains relevant:</p>

<p>“If the content of engineering programs is unrelated to engineering work, why do engineering employers demand employees who have completed such programs? If [sakky’s] characterization of engineering programs is correct, then why are STEM graduates important to the US economy? Perhaps the process of achieving an X.xx GPA in an engineering program develops something important or useful.”

Absolutely false: no topic is ‘inherently’ more difficult than another. The difficulty of any topic can be adjusted at will and inherently arbitrary. Nor does the inherent difficulty have anything to do with subjectivity. Movie quality is subjective, but making good movies is still extremely difficult.

I don’t know about that. It seems reasonable to me that biological constraints might exist that make mastery of some subjects more challenging than others for an average cross-section of the population.</p>