<p>Sure, but they admit plenty of like-minded students. After all, one of MIT’s greatest cross-admit rivals is Stanford, and vice versa. </p>
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<p>Actually, I don’t think I have to, because they already are. As far as the grading is concerned, MIT is a far more relaxed school than it was even 10 years ago, something that has been noted by the ‘MIT-cubed’ (bachelors+masters+PhD all at MIT) graduates that I know, especially those who then stayed at MIT to become professors. The sophomore ‘shadow grading’ system, which provides sophomores with an effectively retroactive course drop after they view their final grades, was instituted only a few years ago. </p>
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<p>And that’s my point: engineering schools probably should raise their selectivity levels. I suspect that one major reason that engineers garner such little professional respect in society is because of the presence of numerous low-tier, low-selectivity engineering programs. In contrast, the graduates of even the lowest-ranked medical school are nevertheless respected physicians.</p>
<p>Absolutely wrong: failing just once, as opposed to over and over again, does hurt you immensely. If you receive a failing grade in your first engineering course and hence leave engineering for another major, future employers and grad schools won’t care that you just tried engineering once. All they will see is that you had a failing grade. </p>
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<p>Nor does that happen either. Engineering has nothing to do with, say, American Studies (which is why no American Studies graduates are hired as engineers, or at least, I hope not ), yet if I fail just a single engineering course and hence switch to American Studies, that failed engineering course remains on my transcript and damages my chances of any career I may hope to obtain with my American Studies degree. </p>
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<p>Then I’ll put it to you this way. Immediately after high school, Jennifer Granholm spent not two but three years in Hollywood trying to become an actress, and essentially ‘failing’, obtaining nothing more than bit roles. So then she went to Berkeley, where she graduated PBK and then went to Harvard Law. Berkeley didn’t seem to mind being used as a ‘lifeboat’ for her failed acting career, and indeed, she’s now one of Berkeley’s most prominent alumni, having been elected Governor of Michigan. </p>
<p>On the other hand, if she had spent years failing in Berkeley’s *acting/drama courses<a href=“assuming%20that%20Berkeley’s%20acting/drama%20courses%20do%20indeed%20fail%20anybody”>/i</a>, we can all agree that she would never have been admitted to HLS, and probably never have been elected as even village dog-catcher. But what’s the difference between failing your acting courses and failing in an actual acting career? </p>
<p>To give you another example, I can think of numerous people who either never went to college upon graduation from high school, or who dropped out of college, to launch tech startups which failed, often times because they couldn’t make the technology work. For example, I know one guy who dropped out of college and spent months building a pre-Youtube audio/video-sharing site, yet he could never make the technology work. That’s basically a ‘failure’ is it not? So he just returned to college where he completed a CS degree with top grades. Nobody holds his failed startup project against him. But why not? Wasn’t that basically a giant failure? Shouldn’t that be equivalent to a string of F grades in computer science? After all, if his computer science course projects did not work, he would have received F’s for those courses. </p>
<p>So, why is there such a difference between a 19-year-old kid building a ‘failed’ software project while enrolled in college vs. that same 19-year-old kid building a ‘failed’ software project while having withdrawn from college? Either way, the project has failed, right? And from the eyes of futures employers, those endeavors are at least as similar as the NBA vs. NFL comparison, are they not? </p>
<p>Yet the fact remains that people are perfectly allowed to ‘fail’ outside of the confines of college without repercussions, but apparently not while in college, which actually makes college a more dangerous environment to fail. If anything, the opposite should be true, as school should be a safer place than the real world in which to try new projects which may fail.</p>
<p>Wrong again: one weeder does kill you. A failed weeder bars you from proceeding to the later engineering courses of the sequence, hence forcing you to another major where that failed grade than hinders your future prospects for life. </p>
<p>To give you a specific example, in the Berkeley chemical engineering program, if you fail ChemE 140, that’s it: you’re expelled from the chemical engineering major (unless you have the bravado to try again the following year, where you may well fail again). You are specifically prohibited from proceeding to ChemE141 or 150AB. So you are forced to leave for another major, while having that failed 140 grade albatross hung around your neck for life. </p>
<p>Again, that’s a one-shot deal. You fail one class, and that’s the end of the ballgame. Just once.</p>
<p>How exactly is allowing students to try, fail, and leave with a clean slate a matter of ‘lowering one’s standards’? They’re not going to graduate with engineering degrees anyway, why not let them leave with a clean slate? </p>
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<p>So are you saying that you’re starting to agree with me: courses that you won’t use should not be held against you?</p>
<p>For the record, I agree that your English courses should not be held against you if you’re not an English major. But this is the engineering forum. Hence, we’re here to talk about engineering-specific topics.</p>
<p>This is the engineering forum, so we’re here to talk about engineering-specific topics. </p>
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<p>Equivalently, the 3.0 engineer (who probably should be getting a 3.6) should have a likewise opportunity of landing that $400k law firm position. Why not? </p>
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<p>It has nothing to do with me thinking that I’m smarter than thousands of HR professionals, but rather akin to precisely what you said: employees may indeed be rational about helping themselves, as opposed to the firms who employ them. HR professionals are indeed intelligent & competent: about helping themselves. Let’s face it: most HR professionals don’t really care about hiring the truly best people that they can find, but rather care about protecting their own position, and they’re obviously excellent at that job. The same, frankly, is true of practically all employees at any company: they’re more interested in protecting and boosting their own position in the company rather than actually improving the company.</p>
<p>In the case of HR staff, they will rely upon GPA screens because it shields them from risk while also giving them less work to do. If they then hire somebody who passes the screen but then nevertheless turns out to be incompetent, HR staff can always point to the GPA screen as evidence that they did the best they could and therefore the onus is supposedly on that school for giving that guy grades that are ‘too high’. It’s nothing more than a CYA move that is not rational for the firm but is entirely rational for the individual HR staffer. </p>
<p>It’s a simple consequence of the fact that individual employees have their own agendas which renders irrational the actions of a firm as a whole. In practically every firm, almost every employee would choose a decision that improves their own internal position within a firm, even if the firm is damaged as a whole. </p>
<p>Surely everybody who has ever worked must know this. Whether we like it or not, this is how firms actually operate internally.</p>
The difference seems clear enough to me: acting courses are academic, and an acting career is not. Having academic failures held against you in academia seems entirely reasonable to me.</p>
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See above. If you compare apples to apples - holding people accountable for their academic failings in academia and for their professional failings in their professions - we might ask whether it would be reasonable for a venture capitalist to deny funding to the dropout for a new venture, after a string of failed startups? Would it be fair to deny the funding if the new startup were in something besides software? I just can’t seem to get shocked at that proposition.</p>
<p>On a side note, I’m not sure it’s as clear-cut for the failed CS startups as you suggest. Gaps in a resume can raise questions when candidates begin to seek employment. However, that’s a completely tangential side-issue and not particularly relevant.</p>
<p>If there’s any problem, it’s that employers are basing their hiring decisions too strongly on academic performance. A better system might allow for the free flow of information detailing students’ academic performance within academic circles, but greatly restrict the flow of information out. Eliminate GPA-based honors and define two classes of transcripts: one version similar to what is around now, and one which simply lists the courses passed (no indication of number of times repeated or GPA).</p>
<p>Candidates can distinguish themselves via work and research experience or extracurriculars, rather than struggling to get as high a GPA as possible. Companies can bear a little more of the burden of finding and choosing the right candidates. Students’ academic performance can continue to be used to evaluate students while they’re in school. The only people I see possibly losing from this are the HR departments, and even they could cope reasonably well.</p>
<p>I would argue that you were probably not much more incompetent than the engineering graduate with a 2.05. Yet he is still given a degree. </p>
<p>But to your point, actually, frankly, I think we probably shouldn’t fail engineers, at least not at the top schools. After all, Stanford practically never does, and indeed, for a time even abolished grades of D’s and F’s. Engineering students should be perfectly allowed to ‘fail themselves’, by simply deciding that it isn’t right for them. After all, I can think of plenty of former engineering students who, while passing (obtaining C’s), nevertheless decided that the program was too difficult and hence switched to easier majors. </p>
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<p>You don’t have to take the scholarship once you win it. Some winners decline them (usually because they won another, more desirable, scholarship). For example, an engineer who wins both the Rhodes and the Marshall could decline the former in favor of the latter. </p>
<p>But at least he has the choice - something that you lack if you can’t even win. After all, consider your counterargument that engineering students are more attracted to graduate opportunities at MIT, Stanford, Caltech and the like. That may well be true…assuming that they get in, which is far from assured. Heck, I can think of several top-performing engineering students who applied to graduate programs at MIT, Stanford, Caltech, and Berkeley…and were rejected by all of them. If they had applied for an won the Rhodes/Marshall, that would at least have given them another option. {Of course we’ll never know because their engineering grades prohibited them from even applying for the Marshall and their GPA for the Rhodes was well sub-par relative to the HASS Rhodes candidates.} </p>
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<p>Oh, I would argue that plenty of incompetence occurs in business and law as well. For example, I’m quite certain that the top management at AIG and Lehman Brother’s didn’t actually intend to destroy their firms, as much of their personal wealth was tied to equity in those firms. {I agree that they may be greedy, but that greed should have compelled them to do everything to preserve the firm, and hence their personal wealth.} </p>
<p>But even if what you are saying is true, then that simply calls for stronger educational standards about business and law * for society as a whole*, and especially for investors and regulators. For example, if businessmen and lawyers indeed wreak harm because of a lack of ethics and scruples, then it is our job as members of society to know what they are doing so that we can stop them. But that means that we then need a more rigorous education on matters of business and law. They can wreak damage only because of a fundamental lack of education on our part. </p>
<p>Either way, rigorous education of business and law (and the underpinning social sciences) is absolutely crucial for society and the lack of such education can result in immense physical harm to society, including death. For example, more than 60 people have already been injured in the ongoing austerity protests in Romania.</p>
<p>Which is merely a tautological statement: academic failures are academic merely because they are defined to be academic. </p>
<p>But even taking your point as given, the real problem is regarding the differing standards of academic ‘failure’. For example, a poorly performing engineering student will receive an F. However, a poorly performing American Studies student will probably still pass (even if with only a C). If academic failures should be held against you in academic settings, then that only seems to be all the more reason to equalize the metrics of ‘academic failures’. </p>
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<p>But again, we don’t. Different majors are graded with different standards, such that even a terrible student (who probably should fail) will likely still pass and graduate…if he just happens to choose an easy major. Those students are not held accountable for their failures.</p>
<p>Hence, we return to my original question: why do we insist that engineering students be held accountable for their failures, but not demand the same from other students? </p>
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<p>I agree that that would be better, but the basic problem is that individual HR employees have little incentive to embrace such a system. And as I explained above, firms behave irrationally usually because individual employees are incentivized to maximize their own internal political standing, even at the expense of the firm. Hence, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for firms (or more accurately, for individual HR staff) to embrace a system that forces them to bear greater search costs while, more importantly, forfeiting their CYA shield.</p>
<p>The argument I’ve heard from HR people (and others who screen applicants) is that they’re deluged with resumes, so they need some way to quickly evaluate candidates. Using a hard GPA cutoff is one way. My general feeling on the subject of the “deluge” is that in a slowly recovering economy, where there is still considerable under- and unemployment, you must expect that more people will be looking for work.</p>
<p>No it doesn’t, and I precisely responded to your argument. </p>
<p>But since you seemed to have missed it, I’ll do it again. We as society make subjective judgments regarding humanities qualities all the time. For example, the Academy Award nominations were announced yesterday, and guess what: the vast majority of films were not nominated for anything. You personally might think that New Year’s Eve was the greatest movie ever made…but practically nobody else will agree with you, and it certainly wasn’t nominated for Best Picture. Obviously, movie quality is subjective - there must be some people in the world who actually enjoyed the New Year’s Eve, the Smurfs, Sucker Punch, Season of the Witch, and the like - but that doesn’t mean that we just give them all Best Picture Oscars merely because ‘movie quality is subjective’. Indeed, critics have been mercilessly lambasting those movies.</p>
<p>So why is society so shy to identify poor quality in humanities students? </p>
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<p>Do they pay for it? They obtain a degree. That’s far better than the failed engineering student who doesn’t even get a degree at all. Haven’t we gone over this? </p>
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<p>No, I never said that they do so in order to attract prospective law/med-school applicants. The historical evidence indicates that they did so starting in the 1960’s/1970’s to provide a deferment refuge for students attempting to avoid the Vietnam War draft (although interestingly, STEM professors apparently did not care whether their students failed and hence might be drafted to fight and die in Vietnam). Then, as societal processes usually do, once established, it maintained itself, probably through self-propagation. For example, many of the former HASS students of the 1960’s/1970’s who enjoyed easy grading became HASS professors themselves and they graded their undergrads easily, etc. </p>
<p>But hey, just because a societal process is established doesn’t mean that it’s beneficial for society. For example, for most of this nation’s history, society enforced a caste system upon minorities, women, and non-Protestant religions, and to some extent probably still does. </p>
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<p>I agree that that is the trade-off as it exists today, but that speaks directly to my question: why does that tradeoff have to exist? Are we not supposed to be encouraging more American youths to study engineering? Seems to me that that’s a goal espoused by American politicians of both parties. Mitt Romney has stated in his book No Apology that he wants more Americans to earn degrees in engineering to match the challenge of Asia. In his State of the Union Address, Obama stated that we needed a more technically competitive workforce. </p>
<p>Hence, we seem to have a rare bipartisan agreement that the nation needs more engineering students - but such an initiative is clearly vitiated by the tradeoff that you identified. After all, given that tradeoff, many students will indeed choose the ‘high-variance’ pathway of HASS.</p>
<p>Which leads back to the original post that sparked this thread. If it is true that engineering grading policies generate a tradeoff between HASS vs. engineering (an area of rare agremeent between me and cosmicfish), and if it is also true that engineers are crucial to economic growth, as both Romney and Obama seem to believe, then it must be true that STEM grading policies are indeed hurting the economy. QED.</p>
<p>I don’t deny that HR staff are acting entirely rationally for themselves. </p>
<p>The real question is whether such a policy is helpful for the firms. After all, a strict reading of such a policy is that firms can consider somebody with a 3.1 GPA from a 4th tier school over somebody with a 2.9 GPA from MIT. But, like I said, HR staff are not really concerned about the vitality of the firm, but rather are concerned about the vitality of their own careers. If that 3.1 graduate from the 4th tier school turns out to be worse than the 2.9 grad from MIT would have been, that’s not the HR staff’s concern (for after all, the latter person never got the job at all so nobody will ever know how well he would have done. More importantly, nobody can blame HR for making the wrong decision.)</p>
<p>In other words, failing *twice<a href=“not%20once”>/i</a> means you normally have to leave the chemical engineering major. Of course, failing once likely means delayed graduation, but that is true for any failure in an important course for your major.</p>
<p>How do low GPA’s in science and mathematics hurt the economy? Engineering, perhaps since they are a presence in industry, but most scientists and mathematicians will never have the chance to work in industry and will either work in academia or will become high school teachers. So, how exactly do the low grades achieved by science and math majors affect the economy, when they aren’t much of an industrial presence to begin with?</p>
<p>Just another reason to chance “STEM” to “TE”. Most employers believe engineering is a completely different field than the sciences, which is why they outright refuse to hire scientists and science graduates for engineering jobs.</p>
<p>Actually, no, effectively, you just need to fail once. The next courses in the sequence are ChemE 141 and 150A, which you are specifically prohibited from taking if you failed 140. And yes, those courses do check your 140 grades and will de-enroll you if you had failed 140 but tried to sign up for the subsequent courses anyway. </p>
<ol>
<li> Chemical Engineering Thermodynamics. (4) Three hours of lecture and one hour of discussion per week. Prerequisites: 140 with a grade of C- or higher; Engineering 7, which may be taken concurrently. Thermodynamic behavior of pure substances and mixtures. Properties of solutions, phase equilibria. Thermodynamic cycles. Chemical equilibria for homogeneous and heterogeneous systems. (SP) </li>
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<p>150A. Transport Processes. (4) Three hours of lecture and one hour of discussion per week. Prerequisites: 140 with a grade of C- or higher; Math 54, which may be taken concurrently. Principles of fluid mechanics and heat transfer with application to chemical processes. Laminar and turbulent flow in pipes and around submerged objects. Flow measurement. Heat conduction and convection; heat transfer coefficients. (SP) </p>
<p>So while the major may not have formally thrown you out of the major if you’ve failed 140, you’re left with the problem of exactly what courses will you be taking? After all, to maintain good technical academic standing, you must pass a certain number of technical courses every semester, which you can’t easily do if you’re not even allowed into the next courses in the sequence. So effectively, you’ve been flunked out of the major and are forced to find something else to do.</p>
<p>One reason is quite obvious: engineering students have to take numerous science and math courses, especially at the intro level. If those courses grade harshly (and they certainly do), then that deters plenty of students from even trying to major in engineering in the first place.</p>
<p>This article and others like it argue that low grading (relative to, say, HASS grading) creates a disincentive for people to enter STEM fields. They feel that kids might be more likely to pursue STEM fields if it wasn’t so (academically) difficult to do well, which might be translated to, if it were possible, say, to do well at STEM academic subjects without having to give up (or at least, spend less time) on some of their other interests, such as music, art, fashion, etc.</p>
<p>It isn’t so much that the earned low GPA’s themselves are an actual drag on the economy.</p>
Well, they’re academic because they happen at academies while students are pursuing academic subjects. If you’re trying to argue that not everything done at universities is academic, I would tend to agree, but that’s a different discussion and possibly one which applies more to majors with a performance component (music, sports, practice, etc.) than to engineering. The point is that - ostensibly - you’re learning different things, and learning things differently, than you would in a non-academic setting (e.g., employment).</p>
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It sounds like you’re arguing that the difficulty of all academic subjects should be equal. Such an argument doesn’t seem convincing when applied to the professional world - should it be just as difficult to flip burgers or mow lawns as it is to play professional football, or to be a tenured Physicist? The very fact that learning and experience is acquired by accumulation seems to fly in the face of the logic behind making all academic subjects equally challenging; certainly a course on PDEs should be harder than one on high-school Algebra? </p>
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Succeeding at something easy isn’t failing. It’s still success. I could set two challenges for myself: flip a coin ten times, and observe at least one head, or flip a coin ten times and observe ten heads in a row. The first challenge is easy, and it’s likely I’ll succeed. The second is much more difficult, and it’s likely I’ll fail. That doesn’t mean that seeing only one head in ten tosses means I failed the first challenge; if anything, it means that I didn’t challenge myself enough. Failing the second challenge doesn’t mean you couldn’t succeed in the first; if anything, it means that you had unrealistically high expectations for yourself. You keep making your argument, and it keeps sounding like this: you shouldn’t punish the second guy for failing, since he was taking on a great challenge. That sounds reasonable for flipping coins, but if it were rescuing survivors from a burning building - people signing up to save either one person or ten people, so that they’d know whether they had enough rescuers to cover the people in danger - it starts to become an issue of responsibility. Perhaps signing up for an engineering major, when you know you are not particularly good at math and science and you don’t want to put a lot of work into making the degree possible, is a sign of irresponsibility? The amount of time a student allows himself/herself to continue behaving irresponsibly (by continuing in engineering despite a string of failing grades) is an indication of the degree of irresponsibility which can be measured, in part, using tools such as the GPA.</p>
<p>If industry punishes students too severely for minor transgressions (for instance, enrolling in an engineering program, failing a bunch of courses, and promptly switching to a more suitable major, after which the GPA improves significantly), that’s a problem with industry or, at most, the academia-industry relationship. Change that; let academics decide how to do their jobs.</p>
<p>And yet that is precisely the sort of analysis used by, say, law schools and med-schools when attempting to determine which applicants amongst various majors they should admit. If somebody who got an A in a “burger-flipping course” better than somebody who got a C in PDE’s? Law and med-school adcoms certainly seem to think so. So does the Marshall Scholarship committee. So do, say, auto insurance firms when determining premium rebates for ‘good’ student performance (which are predicated upon GPA, regardless of the difficulty of the major). So are plenty of outside scholarships which enforce a certain GPA to remain active, again, regardless of the difficulty of your major. </p>
<p>Hence, the point is, whether we like it or not, we have a long litany of institutional processes that are fixated upon the GPA, regardless of the difficulty of your major. I agree with you that that’s irrational, but it’s also probably never going to change, at least, not in our lifetime. The only variable we can readily change is the internal relative grading distribution amongst majors. </p>
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<p>Then why not punish irresponsibility universally? Let’s face it, the guy with straight C’s in American Studies is certainly not a highly responsible student. But he still gets to graduate. He still gets a degree. Should he? Again, why do the engineers get singled out for irresponsibility, when other majors don’t? </p>
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<p>But industry has proven time and time again that they refuse to change. Like I said, industry behaves irrationally all the time: the booms and busts of the business cycle serve as emphatic proof that industry irrationally over- and under-invests perenially throughout history. Or, again, why exactly do American firms persist in paying their top managers more than do their European/Asian counterparts, when there is no evidence to indicate that American managers are more effective?</p>
<p>That’s a curious statement to which I must inquire: why should we simply ‘let’ academics decide how to do their jobs? After all academia is an inherent member of society that survives only by the largesse that we provide. Most colleges are publicly funded and even private schools enjoy tax exemptions and public research funding that we as society choose to provide. Hence, it seems entirely appropriate for we as members of society to care about what academia is doing.</p>
<p>True enough, but I meant this mostly as an alternative to your proposed solution: change academia, let industries decide how to do their jobs. If there’s a disconnect between industry and academia, academia shouldn’t be forced to change because industry won’t. Hasn’t academia been changed by industry enough already? Maybe an ideal solution would be to have academia focus a little less on job training and grading, and to have industry do a little more in recruiting and hiring. It shouldn’t be the job of universities to figure out how to grade students so that they receive fair treatment in industry.</p>