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

[ucbalumnus]

<p>

@sakky

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>Not quite.</p>

<p>The CoC 2011-2012 announcement page 14 contains a map of courses to take.</p>

<p>Let’s suppose that a student follows it up first semester of sophomore year and fails Chemical Engineering 140 (but fail no other course). This will delay Chemical Engineering 141, 142, 150A, 150B, and 185 by a year if 140 is offered only in the fall. However, there are at least five other courses listed later in the map that can be taken in the slots where Chemical Engineering 141, 142, 150A, 150B, and 185 were: Electrical Engineering 100, Chemistry 120A or Physics 137A, science elective, two engineering electives, and breadth electives.</p>

<p>So the remapped schedule could be (assuming no other failures):</p>

<p>Semester 4: Biology 1A, Math 54, Engineering 45, Chemistry 120A
Semester 5: Chemical Engineering 140, Electrical Engineering 100, electives*
Semester 6: Chemical Engineering 141, 150A, 185, electives*
Semester 7: Chemical Engineering 142, 150B, electives*
Semester 8: Chemical Engineering 154, 160, 162, electives*</p>

<ul>
<li>Eight total: one science, one Chemical Engineering, two engineering, two breadth.</li>
</ul>

<p>Of course, the one failure would mean that a student would need to take a greater than normal course load to catch up on courses or units if s/he wants to graduate on time. But it is hardly a complete killer that you make it out to be.</p>

[yagottabelieve]

<p>

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>

<p>In my experience, most academics don’t want to be in the business of training and grading anyway. They want to be free to pursue research. They don’t claim to know what engineers and technologists should know (in order to make the businesses they work at more profitable); they do have some notions of how their areas of research might improve the engineering quality or performance of engineering efforts.</p>

[yagottabelieve]

<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>WRT auto insurance companies, my guess is that most people who apply for auto insurance do not major in grade-deflated subjects. Perhaps statistically speaking, over students taking non-grade-deflated (and specifically, grade-inflated) subjects, there is some correlation between grades and safe driving. Perhaps what would help here is an appeals process by which auto insurance applicants could claim entitlement to a lower insurance rate based on the fact that they were as studious as others in non-grade-inflated majors.</p>

[yagottabelieve]

<p>

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>

<p>Should a course on PDEs be more difficult than a course on high school Algebra in the sense that it should take more time to master the discipline, yes, in my opinion. Should a course on PDEs be graded more severely than a course on high school Algebra, I don’t know. I certainly think it is unfortunate, in the case of students seeking inexpensive auto insurance, but also looking to challenge themselves in the mastery of more difficult subjects such as PDEs, that if they are average performers, and do not earn high grades, they are at risk of paying higher premiums, even if they are less likely to cause accidents.</p>

<p>On a somewhat related note, this issue tends to come up in discussions about whether people should pursue PhDs. There is an argument that once someone enters a PhD program, they are evaluated against all PhD holders and candidates, as opposed to the general public. So even if they possess a level of intelligence that would be considered exemplary, when compared to the entire populace, it doesn’t matter if they are just average PhD candidates, or holders. They won’t, generally speaking, get the opportunities that the better PhD candidates or holders get. (And they might be at risk for positions in other careers.) It’s something anyone pursuing a PhD must think about – do they want it badly enough that they are willing to absorb the risks of not getting it, or not doing above average with respect to their peers.</p>

[cosmicfish]

<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.

This is an amusing argument, in light of your other comments - we supposedly need more engineers, and are unfairly cutting out some of those who underperform, but the solution is to make it harder to get in? I am struggling to think of ANY way that this would help anyone.</p>

<p>

In contrast, the graduates of even the lowest-ranked medical school are nevertheless respected physicians.

Physicians, yes, but respected? Have you never heard the terms “quack” or “Zoidberg”?</p>

[cosmicfish]

<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.

Although this has been addressed by others, a single failing grade outside your major will not kill your GPA or your chances of getting a job. If I have a single 4-credit F and a 116 credits with a 3.0 average, it gives me a final GPA of 2.9 - hardly a fatal blow, and one that can be remedied in several ways depending on the school.</p>

<p>Also, if you stay an engineering student, you CAN take the course again - I have never heard of a “one-and-done” course at ANY school, and mine allowed you to take a course up to 4 times before you would be kicked out of the major. All of this is ignoring the multitude of avenues available to the student - like dropping/withdrawing from the course and trying again. Will it delay graduation? Perhaps, depending on the course and program, but it won’t stop you and there are going to be consequences to failing a core course in your major.</p>

<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.

And vice versa, but regardless someone hiring you for your American Studies degree will not care much about an F in engineering, any more than an engineering employer will care about your F in American Studies.</p>

[cosmicfish]

<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?

So start a new college, and make that one of the tenets of your school. I have no problem giving someone a failing grade in a class that (a) they chose to take, (b) did poorly in, and (c) failed to drop or withdraw from. And I have been there many times.</p>

<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?

No, that was sarcasm.</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.

Your entire participation in this forum is a comparison to other fields of study and endeavor, in which you have raised everything from law, to business, to medicine, to humanities, to arts, to just about every darn thing. I am just doing the same.</p>

[cosmicfish]

<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?

He did have that opportunity - he could have majored in philosophy, gotten the 3.6, gone to law school, and gotten the job. He chose engineering instead. In what world is opportunity independent of your previous choices and gambles?</p>

<p>

Surely everybody who has ever worked must know this. Whether we like it or not, this is how firms actually operate internally.

So your problem is with industry, but you think academia should solve it? Assuming that what you said is 100% true (although I think it insulting to pretty much everyone who has a job), changing the grading scheme would only result in said HR decision-makers moving the goalposts - if they were so lazy and selfish in the first place, how would “giving everyone a trophy” solve that problem?</p>

[cosmicfish]

<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.

Well, you are doing a good job of convincing me that engineers should have at least a 2.5 GPA then. 2.00 is a gift. Heck, let’s make 2.75 the minimum.</p>

<p>

But to your point, actually, frankly, I think we probably shouldn’t fail engineers, at least not at the top schools.

Then talk to “the top schools” - maybe it will work for them. For the 95% of engineers who don’t go to “top” programs, failing those who don’t measure up seems appropriate.</p>

<p>

But at least he has the choice - something that you lack if you can’t even win.

The scholarships you mention take maybe a hundred students a year from all fields. Assuming engineers want a proportional representation, all we need is a dozen or two engineers with a 3.95+ GPA, and I would be surprised if it took more than two major engineering schools to provide that. GPA is not the problem.</p>

[Projectile]

<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.

So what? Physics students have to go through classes that are just as difficult and more theoretical, and yet they are considered to be as unqualified as high school graduates for technical jobs in the private sector. If a student cannot handle basic classical mechanics, rudimentary E&M, vector calculus, ODE’s and PDE’s then they clearly do not have what it takes to be engineers. </p>

<p>Engineers have it easy enough, and you want to dumb their curriculum down even more? At the very least, engineers do not have to learn Lagrangians in their second year like physics students do.</p>

[Projectile]

<p>I agree with everyone that engineering grades should not be inflated, but what about math and physics? Sure, if an engineer is incompetent, people lose their lives. But what about an incompetent physicist or mathematician? At worst, they’ll just waste grant money on experimenting with theories that have no future and will never be tenured. </p>

<p>In one of my classes last semester, the class average before the adjustment was below a 40, and I’m not an engineer.</p>

[yagottabelieve]

<p>An incompetent physicist or mathematician may not be able to explain concepts that are key to the understanding of higher level physics and/or mathematics. While this is not necessarily physically harmful, it is detrimental to students of that physicist or mathematician who are looking for a deeper level of understanding of the subjects.</p>

[sakky]

<p>

Not quite.</p>

<p>The CoC 2011-2012 announcement page 14 contains a map of courses to take.</p>

<p>Let’s suppose that a student follows it up first semester of sophomore year and fails Chemical Engineering 140 (but fail no other course). This will delay Chemical Engineering 141, 142, 150A, 150B, and 185 by a year if 140 is offered only in the fall. However, there are at least five other courses listed later in the map that can be taken in the slots where Chemical Engineering 141, 142, 150A, 150B, and 185 were: Electrical Engineering 100, Chemistry 120A or Physics 137A, science elective, two engineering electives, and breadth electives.</p>

<p>So the remapped schedule could be (assuming no other failures):</p>

<p>Semester 4: Biology 1A, Math 54, Engineering 45, Chemistry 120A
Semester 5: Chemical Engineering 140, Electrical Engineering 100, electives*
Semester 6: Chemical Engineering 141, 150A, 185, electives*
Semester 7: Chemical Engineering 142, 150B, electives*
Semester 8: Chemical Engineering 154, 160, 162, electives*</p>

<ul>
<li>Eight total: one science, one Chemical Engineering, two engineering, two breadth.</li>
</ul>

<p>Of course, the one failure would mean that a student would need to take a greater than normal course load to catch up on courses or units if s/he wants to graduate on time. But it is hardly a complete killer that you make it out to be.

</p>

<p>Absolutely 100% false, for you’ve overlooked the following requirement:</p>

<p>page 9 - Students majoring in
Chemical Engineering other than freshmen
are required to enroll in a minimum of one
chemical engineering course each semester.</p>

<p><a href=“http://chemistry.berkeley.edu/student_info/undergrad_info/publications/chem_11_12.pdf[/url]”>http://chemistry.berkeley.edu/student_info/undergrad_info/publications/chem_11_12.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>So, pray tell, if you’ve failed ChemE 140, exactly which chemical engineering course will you take in the following semester (when ChemE 140 is not offered) to meet the above requirement to remain eligible in the major? Again, the requirement specifically states that the course must specifically be a chemical engineering course, not any other engineering or science course. </p>

<p>So we’re back to what I had said before: one single failure and you’re out.</p>

[sakky]

<p>

This is an amusing argument, in light of your other comments - we supposedly need more engineers, and are unfairly cutting out some of those who underperform, but the solution is to make it harder to get in? I am struggling to think of ANY way that this would help anyone.

</p>

<p>I never said that we needed a greater absolute number of engineers. What we need are more top students to try engineering. At the same time, we surely need fewer of the less capable people within engineering. Let’s face it: if you graduated from engineering with a 2.1 from a low-tier school, you’re probably not a very good engineer. </p>

<p>

Although this has been addressed by others, a single failing grade outside your major will not kill your GPA or your chances of getting a job. If I have a single 4-credit F and a 116 credits with a 3.0 average, it gives me a final GPA of 2.9 - hardly a fatal blow, and one that can be remedied in several ways depending on the school.

</p>

<p>Why should that failing grade hurt you at all, particularly if you’re not going to pursue a major in that discipline anyway? Like I said, if I move to Hollywood for an acting audition and fail miserably, that doesn’t hurt me if I later apply to law school. But if I take an acting college course and fail miserably, that does hurt me. What’s the difference? </p>

<p>

Also, if you stay an engineering student, you CAN take the course again - I have never heard of a “one-and-done” course at ANY school, and mine allowed you to take a course up to 4 times before you would be kicked out of the major.

</p>

<p>But what if you don’t remain within the engineering major? After all, I suspect that most students would take a failure of a core course as a sign that they shouldn’t major in engineering. Fair enough, they tried something, it didn’t work, so they should move on to a different major. But there’s one major problem: that failed grade remains on their transcript. It doesn’t matter that they switched out of engineering: the failed grade remains. Why should it? </p>

<p>Now, certainly, schools often times do have policies that permit you to repeat a failed course. But why would you repeat a failed engineering weeder course if you’ve already decided that you’re not going to major in engineering anyway? </p>

<p>

All of this is ignoring the multitude of avenues available to the student - like dropping/withdrawing from the course and trying again.

</p>

<p>Sure, if they knew what your likely final score would be, along with the accompanying grade curve that would translate your score into a letter grade. The major problem is that many (almost certainly most) engineering weeders place a substantial amount of score weight upon the final exam, the upshot being that you don’t really know if you’re going to fail before you take the final. By the time you know your final score, the course is over and can’t be dropped. I can think of numerous engineering students who were, frankly, shocked that they failed the course, as they were passing - and in some cases, even doing moderately well (i.e. ~B-/C+) - before the final. </p>

<p>

And vice versa,

</p>

<p>Which would not be an issue if American Studies actually failed people at the same rate as engineering did. </p>

<p>

but regardless someone hiring you for your American Studies degree will not care much about an F in engineering, any more than an engineering employer will care about your F in American Studies.

</p>

<p>Uh, sure they will. Again, plenty of employers utilize GPA screens based on comprehensive GPA’s. If you miss the screen because your F grade in engineering pulled your GPA to a 2.9, the employer won’t care why you missed. All the employer sees is that you missed the screen. </p>

<p>Besides, to take your argument at its face value, if it is true that employers won’t care about a single failed grade, then there is no reason not to allow a student to drop that failed grade. After all, employers won’t care anyway, right? So what’s the problem?</p>

[sakky]

<p>

So start a new college, and make that one of the tenets of your school.

</p>

<p>Is this the Plessy v. Ferguson argument: we should establish entirely new colleges for Southern blacks who wanted a college education rather than having the existing colleges modify their policies to accommodate them? I believe the nation tried such a ‘separate but equal’ policy before. </p>

<p>

So start a new college, and make that one of the tenets of your school. I have no problem giving someone a failing grade in a class that (a) they chose to take, (b) did poorly in, and (c) failed to drop or withdraw from. And I have been there many times.

</p>

<p>Then you should stand with me and demand that HASS majors should also fail more of their students who, as you said, (a) they chose to take, (b) did poorly in, and (c) failed to drop or withdraw from. </p>

<p>Which returns to my basic question: why are we so obsessed with only poorly performing engineering students? Shouldn’t we be concerned with poorly performing students in all majors? That seems to be all the more reason to equalize grading schemes. If X% of engineering students must fail, fine, so should X% of all students in other majors. </p>

<p>

Your entire participation in this forum is a comparison to other fields of study and endeavor, in which you have raised everything from law, to business, to medicine, to humanities, to arts, to just about every darn thing. I am just doing the same.

</p>

<p>So it seems as if you’re agreeing with me: we are both equally justified in bringing in non-engineering careers into this discussion. So I ask you - why must an engineering student carry an extra burden in pursuing non-engineering careers, when students in other majors do not? </p>

<p>

He did have that opportunity - he could have majored in philosophy, gotten the 3.6, gone to law school, and gotten the job. He chose engineering instead. In what world is opportunity independent of your previous choices and gambles?

</p>

<p>That is precisely my point: why exactly should his opportunity be constrained just because he chose engineering? By doing so, we are simply discouraging promising students from even trying engineering at all. </p>

<p>

So your problem is with industry, but you think academia should solve it?

</p>

<p>Sure, why not? It’s worked numerous times before in US history: most famously by reducing institutionalized racism in US businesses by providing minorities with equal access to academic opportunities. Whether we like it or not, academia is the gateway to social & economic mobility in this nation, and so the policies that academia implements have profound effects upon the structure of the economy and society as a whole. It is therefore entirely appropriate that we as members of this society care about what academia does. </p>

<p>

Well, you are doing a good job of convincing me that engineers should have at least a 2.5 GPA then. 2.00 is a gift. Heck, let’s make 2.75 the minimum.

</p>

<p>Then by the same token, let’s make the 2.75 the minimum for all majors. Again, why are you so fixated on singling out only the engineers? </p>

<p>

Then talk to “the top schools” - maybe it will work for them. For the 95% of engineers who don’t go to “top” programs, failing those who don’t measure up seems appropriate.

</p>

<p>Then at the very least, you could allow those people who fail and then choose to leave the major (because they took that failure as a signal that they’re not cut out as engineers) to leave with a clean slate. But you’re not even willing to do that. </p>

<p>

The scholarships you mention take maybe a hundred students a year from all fields. Assuming engineers want a proportional representation, all we need is a dozen or two engineers with a 3.95+ GPA, and I would be surprised if it took more than two major engineering schools to provide that. GPA is not the problem.

</p>

<p>Fair enough, then take GPA off the table by equalizing the grading schemes between engineering and non-engineering majors. After all, if, as you say, GPA is not the problem anyway, then there will be no harm in equalizing the schemes, right?</p>

[sakky]

<p>

So what?

</p>

<p>Uh, what do you mean, ‘so what’? The ‘so what’ is that science and math grading impacts engineers just as much as engineering grading does. </p>

<p>

Physics students have to go through classes that are just as difficult and more theoretical, and yet they are considered to be as unqualified as high school graduates for technical jobs in the private sector.

</p>

<p>I believe I handled this issue in the other thread, and you conceded that that was hyperbole. To paraphrase what you said: high school graduates can’t even pass the initial HR screens at all. So why are you re-invoking a notion that you had walked back in the other thread? </p>

<p>

If a student cannot handle basic classical mechanics, rudimentary E&M, vector calculus, ODE’s and PDE’s then they clearly do not have what it takes to be engineers.

</p>

<p>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. </p>

<p>

Engineers have it easy enough, and you want to dumb their curriculum down even more? At the very least, engineers do not have to learn Lagrangians in their second year like physics students do.

</p>

<p>Are we really ‘dumbing down’ their curriculum? Again, most engineers do not need to know much math or physics theory to do the actual job. They merely need it to actually graduate from their programs, but that’s an artificial requirement at best.</p>

[sakky]

<p>

I agree with everyone that engineering grades should not be inflated,

</p>

<p>Hey, I’m a person and therefore part of the collective ‘everybody’, and you clearly do not agree with me. </p>

<p>

Sure, if an engineer is incompetent, people lose their lives. But what about an incompetent physicist or mathematician? At worst, they’ll just waste grant money on experimenting with theories that have no future and will never be tenured.

</p>

<p>On this point, I have always agreed: math and science grades should also be raised. </p>

<p>

n one of my classes last semester, the class average before the adjustment was below a 40, and I’m not an engineer.

</p>

<p>Well, I’m afraid you won’t get any sympathy from me. I distinctly remember an engineering exam where the mean (unadjusted) score was a 25%. Basically, if you got a 30%, you celebrated, as you had one of the best performances in the class (despite the fact that you got 70% of the questions wrong).</p>

[sakky]

<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>

<p>I am not opposed to attempting to change industry. But the perfect should not be the enemy of the good. All proposals should be on the table, and changing academia is one such proposal. </p>

<p>But as I said before, whether we like it or not, academia serves as the gateway to both social/economic mobility in the nation, and is a vital element of the nation’s future economic health by developing and allocating the nation’s human capital. Perhaps you could argue that academia shouldn’t have that role, but like it or not, it does have that role. Hence, what academia does has a profound impact upon the rest of society. If engineering grades harsher than do other majors, that will simply discourage students from ever trying engineering in favor of those other majors, thereby eroding the technology base of the nation. </p>

<p>I’ve seen a lot of discussion on this thread about the dangers of ‘incompetent’ engineering graduates. But interestingly, nobody seems to be interested in the dangers of incompetent graduates of other majors. That is especially ironic given that the current economic/financial mayhem which has immiserated millions of people and instigated social strife that has killed or injured hundreds of people around the world was enabled by economic/business incompetence - whether by the bankers themselves, or by the regulators and investors who were supposed to be overseeing them. {For example, I’m sure that every single Lehman Brothers investor surely wishes that they themselves had been more competent about economic/financial matters and hence chosen not to invest in Lehman.}</p>

[cosmicfish]

<p>

Then you should stand with me

Nope. I don’t blame the system for my own failures. I accept them, fix them, and move on.</p>

<p>

Which returns to my basic question: why are we so obsessed with only poorly performing engineering students? Shouldn’t we be concerned with poorly performing students in all majors? That seems to be all the more reason to equalize grading schemes. If X% of engineering students must fail, fine, so should X% of all students in other majors.

If I extended your argument outside the classroom, should the Navy pass only 20% of the students in all their classes, simply because that is the approximate pass rate for prospective SEALs? Some subjects are harder to pass than others - we have discussed some reasons why engineering and the hard sciences are graded harded than subjects that are easier and/or more subjective. Why should we punish students who are keeping above water in an easier major?</p>

<p>

That is precisely my point: why exactly should his opportunity be constrained just because he chose engineering? By doing so, we are simply discouraging promising students from even trying engineering at all.

Choosing a major is inherently constraining. You are picking a specialty, and when you do so you accept that each major is different and offers different opportunities. Plus, if the goal is to increase the number of engineers, I would argue that people who are turning away from engineering because they are afraid of the 0.2-0.3 average hit to GPA compared to easier majors are probably not planning on being engineers in the first place. If they intend to be engineers, admission requirements to law or medical schools, or requirements for “any degree will do so long as you graduate” jobs don’t really matter. If (as you have averred) we are mostly concerned about “top” students, then it should matter even less, as the “I didn’t get a 3.0 GPA and no one will want me” anxiety should be easily allayed, and we only have to worry about the miniscule fraction of prospective students who are more worried about getting a Rhodes Scholarship than in what they will be doing for the rest of their lives. If the goal is to increase the number of engineers, I would rather focus on those who enter engineering with the intention of being engineers, and see no merit in making engineering a better pipeline to other careers.</p>

<p>

Whether we like it or not, academia is the gateway to social & economic mobility in this nation, and so the policies that academia implements have profound effects upon the structure of the economy and society as a whole.

And to everyone not desperate to be in the top 1%, engineering offers excellent mobility. To those who are so desperate, there are other paths. Engineering is not unique in this.</p>

<p>

Then by the same token, let’s make the 2.75 the minimum for all majors. Again, why are you so fixated on singling out only the engineers?

Because I do not feel comfortable arbitrarily assigning minimum standards of competence to fields not my own. Ultimately, a 2.00 is probably not competent in ANY field, but I feel that determinations of competence are probably best made by employers - as an engineer, I would not hire a 2.00 GPA engineer for a professional position, and the fact that they have a diploma is therefore irrelevant to me.</p>

<p>

Then at the very least, you could allow those people who fail and then choose to leave the major (because they took that failure as a signal that they’re not cut out as engineers) to leave with a clean slate. But you’re not even willing to do that.

No I am not, and here is why: I have no evidence that, categorically, the reasons for that failure are unique to engineering and independent of general academic performance. If you could show that 100% of the reason 100% of engineering students fail is for reasons 100% unique to engineering, then I would consider this a reasonable proposition, but that is just not the case. </p>

<p>Students dropping out of engineering are not consistently getting A’s in all their non-engineering classes and D’s in all the engineering classes, and many of the reasons they get bad grades in engineering classes also apply to the other courses they take. If someone fails an engineering course because they were half-assed on their homework, barely studied for exams, missed classes, and generally demonstrated poor scholarship… then that is relevant to any other major. If they genuinely failed for reasons unique to engineering, if they ARE getting straight A’s everywhere else but are failing in engineering, then they are a relatively uniqe case in my experience. I spent a lot of time in the gutters of engineering school, and I never saw such a case.</p>

<p>

Fair enough, then take GPA off the table by equalizing the grading schemes between engineering and non-engineering majors. After all, if, as you say, GPA is not the problem anyway, then there will be no harm in equalizing the schemes, right?

There would also be no reason for me to tell other people how to do their job.</p>

[cosmicfish]

<p>

So we’re back to what I had said before: one single failure and you’re out.

It appears that one of two things is happening with your evaluation of ChemE at Berkeley:</p>

<p>(1) This is not the problem that you think it is, but since none of us are in that predicament at that department none of us are familiar with the resolution. I think if you are in this situation at Berkeley, they might well have a solution, but NOT being in that situation I am not in a position to obtain an answer.</p>

<p>(2) This is the problem that you think it is, but with a much narrower scope. That is, this is something to address with that specific department at that specific school, because it does not appear to be a problem in other places.</p>