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

sakky · January 27, 2012, 10:23am

How is it insulting? Is it not a matter of simple reality that employees are more incentivized to help themselves rather than their employers? Even if it isn’t true for every single employee, it certainly would seem to be true as a statistical aggregate.

Besides, if what I am saying is false and insulting, then why do so many firms pay part of their compensation in the form of stock options or restricted stock?* The phraseology that is usually used is that such compensation serves to ‘align incentives’ by having employees care about the future of the company. But why is that necessary at all if employees already care about their employer?

So it seems to me that you have two choices: (1)Employee incentives are indeed naturally unaligned (which would cause firms to behave irrationally) and so firms attempt to align those incentives through stock packages* or (2) Firms are irrationally wasting resources by devising such packages to align employee incentives that are already aligned anyway. Either way, firms are behaving irrationally.

*The major problem with such compensation packages is that they are largely ineffective for most lower-level employees, especially at the larger firms, for such employees have little individual impact upon the overall health of the firm. Let’s face it - if you’re a regular HR staffer at a giant firm such as GE, the impact of your performance on GE stock price is negligible. You could be the greatest HR staffer in history and the stock price could still plummet through the actions of people far more powerful than yourself.

Whether they would or not is an empirical question, for you are presuming that firms as a whole behave rationally. If firms truly were rational, then you would expect that firms would have long ago recognized that Stanford inflates its engineering grades relative to MIT and hence would require higher GPA’s from Stanford graduates relative to MIT graduates. But many don’t, and instead implement a universal 3.0 GPA screen across the board, regardless of which school you came from.

I said it before and I’ll say it again: firm traditions/cultures/rituals take on a life of their own and therefore exhibit great, sometimes permanent, longevity. One plausible narrative is that HR implements a GPA screen simply to shield themselves from attack from top management by demonstrating that HR is enforcing ‘high’ quality standards. That top management almost always consists of older people who themselves were college educated during the days prior to widespread HASS grade inflation. If schools raised their grading, firms might not respond, because GPA screens may have well become institutionalized as a tradition. We should never automatically presume that firms will respond rationally. {As a contemporary case in point, why did Kodak not properly respond to the digital imaging challenge when they themselves had invented and patented much of the digital technology, and when numerous commentators and investors had for more than a decade pointedly advised them to shift to digital? The evidence indicates that the Kodak employee culture continued to be enamored with analog film as a decades-long tradition. Now they’re bankrupt and many of those employees are likely to lose their jobs, pensions and health benefits.}

But even if firms did respond rationally by raising their GPA screensto schools raising their engineering GPA’s, so what? At least then engineering students would not be hurt through deficient GPA’s if they wanted to pursue other careers (i.e. med school, law school). And the ‘incompetent’ engineers who you so fear would still be screened out. So it seems as if we have a clear winning move: we have everything to gain and nothing to lose. So why not do it?

cosmicfish · January 27, 2012, 10:26am

Because there is a higher correlation between success/failure in academic ventures than there is between academia and many outside professions. D engineering students don’t generally turn around and become A American Studies students, because the ability to perform in one is significantly coupled to the ability to perform in the other. This is not true for acting and law school. Astonishingly.

Because you want to be an engineer, and feel that you have identified a path that will allow you to succeed. At PSU, failing one or more of the core courses is not uncommon - by your standards, a great many students should drop out of engineering because they struggled in one area of engineering in which they were probably never going to actually work.

First of all, I challenge “~B-/C” as doing “moderately well” - that is well within the range for concern. Second, what you are describing is a problem common but not unique to engineering, and one whose resolution I would support wholeheartedly - poor grading schemes that excessively weight tests over homework and projects.

And if they are screening to get the top X% of applicants, all you will have accomplished is to move the marker - those lazy, self-serving HR specialists will just set a 3.2 GPA minimum. Unless you are talking about non-engineering employers, in which case I suggest they talk to MBA programs, which often include a high proportion of engineers despite those malicious assaults on their GPAs by heartless universities.

Because until you graduate, other academic departments to which you might transfer also get to pick what they care about. And while I HAVE heard employers state that they only really cared about grades in relevant courses, I have NOT heard that from non-engineering professors. And in my experience, I think that is appropriate.

sakky · January 27, 2012, 11:01am

Well, to your credit, I don’t think you failed. Or at least, I don’t think you failed any worse than the ‘poorly-performing’ American Studies students did. And yet they still passed.

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.

To give you a case in point, I distinctly remember an engineering exam where the mean score was a 25%. The curve therefore computed that everybody who scored higher than a 30% received an A- or better. But why? You still got the vast majority (70%) of the questions wrong. That 30% would equate to an A- was a purely arbitrary choice, which had practically nothing to do with your level of knowledge. {In most other courses, getting 70% of the questions wrong would equate to an F.} Curved engineering grading is therefore inherently arbitrary. I cannot deduce somebody’s level of absolute engineering knowledge strictly from his grades. All I can deduce is where he stood relative to the probability distribution in his class, but that probability distribution is also effectively unobservable to me. If somebody has an engineering A grade, what does he really know? Maybe he only knows 30% of the material on a (very difficult) exam. Who knows? I as the employer certainly don’t know.

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.

Look, unlike many other disciplines, engineering is generally an enigma to most incoming college freshmen. I don’t know what high school you attended, but mine certainly didn’t offer any engineering coursework. And my high school was considered to be one of the better high schools in the region. Hence, most college freshmen either choose or not choose engineering without really knowing what it is, and certainly few incoming students are ‘completely sure’ that they want to be engineers. Engineering is something that therefore has to be tried in college, because they never had an opportunity to try it in high school. If more people tried it, I suspect that more people would find that they wanted to do it.

After all, why do car dealerships offer test drives? Why do electronics stores such as the Apple Retail Store exhibit show models of their products? What if Apple forced everybody who wanted to try the Ipad to immediately purchase it, with no opportunity to return it?

I am not saying that engineering is all bad. Indeed, I have always said that engineering is pretty good. But it could be made even better. Or, are you simply not interested in having the system improve? If so, then you should just say so.

Then like I said before, even if engineering stops flunking out so many students (instead giving them, say, 2.1’s), then you still wouldn’t hire them anyway. And I am not asking you to change your personal hiring preferences. So what’s the problem? If engineering schools raise their grades to stop flunking so many students out, and employers then hire some supposedly incompetent engineers, well, that’s the problem of those employers, not your problem. So why do you object so vociferously? {Now, if you fear that your employer might well be one of those employers, then that would be something you should take up with your HR staff, assuming that they haven’t “rationally” raised their GPA screens in response.}

So now we have two choices. We raise engineering grades. In response, (1) employers raise their GPA screens. But if that’s the case, then at least engineering students will be more competitive for other careers or for Marshall Scholarships. Or (2) employers won’t raise their GPA screens. But if that is the case, then you have to concede that employers do not behave rationally. Pick one.

And if your argument is correct - that engineering failure is correlated with general academic failure - then that student will then surely ought to start failing his courses in his new (non-engineering) major. So then the onus is then on those other majors to fail out those incompetent students (and if they don’t, then that’s a problem with those other majors).

So what are you afraid of? Incompetent former engineering students will then just fail out of their new major. So whether engineering gives them a clean slate or not won’t matter. So what’s the problem? At least then you would be helping those students whose engineering failure is entirely uncorrelated with performance in their new major.

Or are you afraid that those other majors actually won’t fail out incompetent students?

Isn’t it entirely appropriate that we do? We’re having an election in November, where the entire citizenry will be effectively telling our politicians how to do their job or be fired. Through them, we will also be telling academics - through public funding of state schools and through tax exemptions and grant funding of private schools - how to do their jobs.

Or, are you saying that, as citizens, we nevertheless have no right to participate on what are necessarily matters of public interest?

aegrisomnia · January 27, 2012, 11:06am

In fairness, I never argued that your proposal wasn’t a proposal; I just tend to think that it’s not a very good one, at least compared to potential alternatives, and given my perception of the actual severity of the problem it’s aimed at solving. The cure is worse than the disease.

Honestly, I don’t know how you can insist that academia needs to change, when we - as a society - are expected to simply take certain other factors for granted. I could say that “like it or not, engineering majors are graded more harshly than liberal arts majors; there’s no changing that.” You said yourself that all proposals should be on the table. Why, then, arbitrarily decide that there’s nothing we can do to address an (arguably) far more fundamental cause of the problem, namely, that industry relies too much on academic performance to predict job performance?

I suspect that some engineering majors’ leaving engineering is probably more symptomatic of the industry/academia disconnect than it is of the grading policy inside engineering. As long as industry relies primarily on past academic performance, rather than experience and demonstrated ability, the problem isn’t going anywhere. If industry, professional school, and prestigious scholarship boards are beyond reproach, who’s to say that they don’t simply stop considering engineering graduates for anything? Giving them a free pass isn’t the answer to getting more students to stick it out through engineering.

For what it’s worth, I am inclined to agree that this is a spurious argument. For one, such an argument is ultimately based in a belief that engineering is somehow more important than the liberal arts, and I don’t know that any reasonable person would really argue that. Secondly, there are plenty of examples of the liberal arts having devastating impacts on humanity. Politics, the military, law, finance, and religion come to mind as possible examples.

Projectile · January 27, 2012, 11:10am

Patently false. One of my professors was a nominee for Nobel prize in physics, and he couldn’t teach anything. Another one of my professors was taught in graduate school class by a Nobel Laureate, and all he would do according to him is come in to class and crack some jokes and then leave. When it came to the exams, they were brutal and he had the highest mark because he answered 1 question correctly out of 10.

I don’t think competence in the field implies one can teach the concepts to students. Most of my professors are quite accomplished in their fields, yet most students taking their classes have to teach themselves the subject because they just aren’t good teachers and do not emphasize what is going to be on the exam.

sakky · January 27, 2012, 11:25am

Is an acting college course really an ‘academic’ venture?

But they could well become C American Studies students, and that’s good enough to pass.

It seems to me that an acting course would therefore be about acting and also should carry no weight when it comes to law school admissions. But law school adcoms will use it anyway.

Uh, did you read what I said? I said somebody who had decided, because he had failed engineering, to not major in engineering. Exactly why would such a student then repeat an engineering course?

Actually, the school should modify its policies so that those students aren’t failing, or at least allow them to leave with a clean slate.

I happen to think that that a B-/C+ is not bad - particularly in weeder courses where the mean grade is curved around a C+.

But in any case, the point is that those grades are passing. Those students were clearly passing before the final, and then only failed post-final when they had no opportunity to drop/withdraw.

And again, you are presuming that obtaining a top X% of candidates is indeed the true purpose of GPA screens, rather than merely being a ritualized cultural firm tradition (for example, why was it Kodak tradition for employees to stop work and rush home promptly at 5PM every day, even as the company was clearly dying?) or just a CYA scheme used by HR staff to shield them from political attacks from top management. {For example, if some employee proves to be incompetent, HR can simply point to the existence of the GPA screen and therefore shift the blame to the school that gave that employee such high grades.}

But fine, even if you’re correct that HR will shift its screen, so what? At least we’ll have equalized the grading schemes of engineering, therefore removing the risk of prospective engineering students of losing opportunities in other careers.

Actually, that’s not correct: they get to pick what we say that they get to pick. After all, we would not allow an academic department to simply pick, say, only white students, a practice many universities enacted for centuries and which was ultimately resolved in the 1960’s.

But that’s actually beside the issue: for I’m not asking those other departments to pick anything. After all, right now, plenty of failed engineering students shift to other departments, without having to be ‘picked’. The issue is whatever happens to those failed grades on the final transcript. If somebody tries engineering, fails, shifts to American Studies and passes, why should that failed engineering course be listed on the transcript? He’s not going to be given an engineering degree anyway, so who cares? Let him walk away with a clean engineering slate.

aegrisomnia · January 27, 2012, 11:46am

It should be, and if it’s not, it’s a problem with the course, not with academia.

So you’re saying D American Studies students couldn’t become C engineering students? Maybe that’s unfair to you; are you saying that it’s just less likely? Could you estimate the odds?

At least some people - me, and cosmicfish - apparently believe there is a difference between a professional experience and an academic experience. If you reject this, there’s no more convincing I can do.

If there’s a chance to fail a course based on the student’s grade going into a final, it seems pretty clear to me that the student isn’t doing all that well. This means one of two things: the student hasn’t done much graded work at all, so the student should not put any stock into the grade they happen to have; or the student has had borderline performance in lots of graded work, and should therefore know that taking the final is risky. Clearly, you can fall somewhere in between. Having an A on 100 points of graded material should be little comfort going into a final if the final’s worth 900 points. Similarly, having a grade of 630/900 points should be little comfort if the final is worth 100 ponts. Being able to recognize situations like these and accurately assess one’s ability and motivation are factors which should be taken into account in any field of academics. That’s why American Studies professors care about a failing grade in engineering - it demonstrates poor planning.

Other engineering departments have a right to know about this failure, if the student should ever try to go back to engineering. If it’s stricken from the transcript, how would you keep track of this information? Then, what’s to keep companies from demanding this information? We return to the solution that I suggested: academia should hold onto almost all the detailed information about student performance, and give industry only enough to determine whether the student has graduated and taken certain courses (and maybe that’s going too far).

sakky · January 27, 2012, 11:49am

Then by all means, let’s hear the other proposals, fully fleshed out. If you want to criticize somebody else’s proposal, then I think it’s only fair that you offer an alternative.

But I would remark that if the cure is worse than the disease, well, the ‘cure’ has already been enacted - although inadvertently - by the HASS majors. They’ve already inflated their grades (in response to the military draft), and that has given their graduates an advantage in competing for other careers. {To be clear, I don’t think that was their intent, but it was the effect.} And those other majors are not exactly champing at the bit to change. Those other majors are therefore imposing a cost on the engineering departments by having their students look relatively bad via a GPA comparison. All I ask is that that cost be removed.

And again, I never said that I was opposed to such a proposal. By all means, make the proposal. That is to say, how would you actually compel firms to hire based on experience rather than on academic performance?

In my case, my proposal is actually rather old (and hence, I do not claim originality): each department should be forced to use a ‘grade bank’, where only a certain percentage of grades of each letter can be assigned across the department. For example, if only X% of engineering students can receive an A, fair enough, then only X% of American Studies students can receive an A. Departments of public universities who refused to comply would no longer be provided with any public funding. {Moral suasion and social pressures would then likely compel many private universities to follow.}

Regarding industry, eventually US engineering firms will eventually have to hire some new American engineers (they can’t all come from Asia). So there will have to be some criteria to determine who is hired.

Regarding prof-school adcoms and scholarship committees, raising sufficient awareness of the differentials in grading standards might also do the trick. But I continue to believe that the easiest method to solve that problem is to simply equalize grading treatments.

Another possibility is to ‘conceal’ one’s grades by simply shielding evidence of failure from outside prying parties (such as med-school adcoms). For example, students could have two transcripts: the ‘real’ transcript, and the ‘clean’ transcript that expunges failed grades from prying eyes.

Deceitful and outrageous, you say? *Well, that’s exactly what MIT does right now<a href=“albeit%20with%20only%20freshman%20and%20sophomore%20’shadow’%20grades”>/i</a>. Each MIT student has two transcripts, their internal “real” transcript that shows all grades, and the external transcript that expunges all D/F (freshman/sophomore-shadow) grades. Is is the latter transcript that MIT students present to outside grad schools and to employers. The former transcript is only used for internal counseling purposes. {Or of course one could simply follow the Stanford strategy of practically never failing anybody in the first place, hence obviating the need for dual transcripts.}

Projectile · January 27, 2012, 11:50am

Why should engineering grades be raised, though? I haven’t heard of anybody dying due to the incompetence of a mathematician or physicist, but many people have died when an engineer is incompetent. The general public want the best of the best in engineering to design the houses they live and the bridges they drive over, but most couldn’t careless about incompetent physicists/mathematicians since those professions have no impact on the general public.

Engineering grades should remain the same, but grading for math/physics majors should be increased.

cosmicfish · January 27, 2012, 11:51am

No, I failed quite spectacularly, and had I been an American Studies major I still would have done so. Even if I had passed, I would have been in no better place, as a 2.05 graduate in any field is hardly going to find “professional” employment with significant obfuscation that would probably cost them said job if discovered.

True, but the number of students for whom a subject is “easy” can vary substantially between majors, and when I describe a major as “hard” this is what I mean - that a relatively small percentage of the student population is capable of successfully completing the course of study compared to other majors.

Yes, but making truly bad and unprofitable movies isn’t too easy either, and art is always a bad comparison to anything that is not also art.

Yep, I had those courses too, plus another engineering course where everyone in the class had a 90%+ going into the final (the first-time professor remedied this by making the final entirely about obscure points that he had made during class, always followed by the phrase “you don’t need to remember this, I just thought it was interesting”). This complaint is valid, but is not inherently related to GPA - the problem is one of a mismatch between grading standards and instructional quality for that course. Most of my engineering courses have had exam averages in the B or high-C range, right where they should be.

Many disciplines are an enigma to most incoming freshmen, simply because the things you are studying as a senior or graduate student are quite different than what you think you will be studying. I was friends with a philosophy senior at one point, and (being interested in philosophy myself) discussed the subject with him - he then spent several minutes trying to explain to me why everything I thought about philosophy and the job of philosophers was wrong. Go figure.

Anyway, my alma mater now has “freshman seminars” where prospective engineers can take a 1-credit class (eligible for but not required to be pass/fail) specifically designed to showcase the major and show them what they are in for. Sounds like a fine idea.

Now this is just fantastics, because between failing out of school and being allowed to re-enter it, I spent a year selling cars and about 6 months selling at Circuit City. So let me note that engineering allows you a trial period as well, and while Apple may allow you a couple of weeks to return an iPod, the drop date for most courses is much longer and the opportunities to change majors lasts for years. In both cases you can fail to see the problem during the time allotted (and with cars, this is almost certainly so), but you nonetheless have time to do so.

Anecdotally, I sold a very nice SUV to an elderly gentleman once, his family by his side. I thought it a good sale, he and his family thought it a good buy. Saw him back in the dealership 6 weeks later - he was not used to a console shifter, and accidentally drove his SUV through his garage door. His remedy? None. The dealership would not take the car back just because this problem did not occur in the hour or so he had previously spent in the vehicle, and with the $15k in depreciation caused by new-car drive-off and collision damage he would up having to choose between a car he disliked and taking a substantial financial hit.

Sounds just like college!

Sure, I am interested in having the system improve. I just do not consider what you are describing to be an improvement.

[quote]
So now we have two choices. We raise engineering grades. In response, (1) employers raise their GPA screens. But if that’s the case, then at least engineering students will be more competitive for other careers or for Marshall Scholarships. Or (2) employers won’t raise their GPA screens. But if that is the case, then you have to concede that employers do not behave rationally. Pick one. <a href=“1”>/quote</a> I have no stake in making engineering a better gateway for non-engineering careers, and while I AM interested in getting more good engineers, I don’t see how grade inflation gets us there. I also see no merit in feeding more engineers to the Marshall committee when the number of engineers with GPA’s in the appropriate already far exceeds the number of prestige fellowships available, especially when compensation and funding in graduate education already substantially favors STEM fields.

(2) Even if they did not raise a formal cutoff, I would expect to see little change. Just as major graduate programs often list an official minimum, there is still often a preliminary step where some relatively junior staff member culls the group for the top X%, generally based on relatively arbitrary criteria. Or do you see many 3.5 GPA admits for MIT grad programs?

And yet success and overall GPA are already decided by a variety of departments. My GPA includes grades from English, Classics, Math, Physics, Chemistry, Health… the list goes on. Why should Engineering be excluded from including a bad grade or two?

No, I do think that we should so participate… I just don’t think we should micromanage without cause. I see problems in engineering education (some of which we have touched on), I just do not think that the bulk of issues you have raised are problems, and the couple of genuine problems you HAVE touched in are either almost incidental to your main points.

ucbalumnus · January 27, 2012, 12:04pm

In that case, you can take Chemical Engineering C178 or 180, none of which list 140 as a prerequisite. So failing 140 once will not prevent you from meeting the “at least one Chemical Engineering course per semester” requirement to remain in the major.

sakky · January 27, 2012, 12:08pm

Yeah, well, if the course classification isn’t going to change, then we have to look for remedies elsewhere.

First off, I rather doubt that there are many D American Studies students in the first place. But of the few that may exist, the odds of them becoming a passing engineering students is probably <10%.

But that’s irrelevant, for I have no problem with any D American Studies students transferring to engineering and passing (what few may actually exist). The point is, they tried a major, it didn’t work, so they moved on to something else in which they are more successful. What’s the problem? Why should that failed attempt hurt them?

In the case of acting, I do reject this notion…and so did you. You yourself said that the problem was with the fact that the acting class was improperly classified.

You even agree with me on the larger point that the larger problem is that firms and prof-school adcoms are improperly relying on certain types of academic criteria too heavily and that there is a difference between law school and how somebody did in chemical thermodynamics and certainly a difference between engineering grades and actual engineering job performance.

If there’s a chance to fail a course based on the student’s grade going into a final, it seems pretty clear to me that the student isn’t doing all that well. This means one of two things: the student hasn’t done much graded work at all, so the student should not put any stock into the grade they happen to have; or the student has had borderline performance in lots of graded work, and should therefore know that taking the final is risky. Clearly, you can fall somewhere in between. Having an A on 100 points of graded material should be little comfort going into a final if the final’s worth 900 points. Similarly, having a grade of 630/900 points should be little comfort if the final is worth 100 ponts. Being able to recognize situations like these and accurately assess one’s ability and motivation are factors which should be taken into account in any field of academics.

Come on, who are we really talking about here? Those eng students didn’t choose their courses scoring scheme. They had to take them as a given. It’s not their fault if the final exam is weighted heavily, as they had no role in deciding that it should be so. By your logic, nobody should ever take a course with a heavily-weighted final, because even somebody with an A+ walking into a heavily-weighted final could bomb and fail the course, and that would demonstrate ‘poor planning on his part’.

Um, there seems to be some sort of deep confusion and mythology regarding the notion that American Studies professors somehow care about poor performance in engineering - something that I never said, nor do I believe. Indeed, American Studies profs don’t care, for they generally take all students, even if they had failed their previous major. All they care about is whether you do well in their class.

Where that failing eng grade becomes an issue is later when that person then graduates and needs to find a job or a grad school. Why should that failing eng grade hurt him, if he never completed the engineering major anyway?

Really? Why? If that student is bad, then he’ll inevitably fail his new engineering major, will he not?

So then are you saying that MIT is wrong? For example, somebody who attends MIT and fails all his freshman courses can apply to transfer to another engineering school (i.e. Stanford) with a completely pristine (external) transcript.

sakky · January 27, 2012, 12:14pm

Ha - nice try. Trust me, if you’re only a 2nd year chemical engineering student (which is the scenario at play), and especially if you had failed ChemE140, you will find C178 to be extraordinarily rough sailing. You simply haven’t had the proper preparation in both upper division chemical engineering or chemistry to survive this course.

ChE180 requires consent of the instructor, and consent for that course is actually far from automatic to obtain. Particularly, if you had failed ChemE140.

Either way, these do not seem to be realistic options.

sakky · January 27, 2012, 12:19pm

You haven’t?

[Demon</a> core - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core]Demon”>Demon core - Wikipedia)

[Top</a> 10 Scientists Killed or Injured by Their Experiments](<a href=“http://listverse.com/2008/06/04/top-10-scientists-killed-or-injured-by-their-experiments/]Top”>Top 10 Scientists Killed or Injured by Their Experiments - Listverse)

Granted, they only killed themselves. But hey, death is still death.

But more importantly, if math/physics produces a flawed theorem that an engineer takes to build a technology that kills somebody, why is the entire onus upon the engineer?

aegrisomnia · January 27, 2012, 12:29pm

My proposal is this: have academia severely limit the amount of information available to industry, on which industry might base misguided hiring decisions. Let the GPA be for internal use only. Have two transcripts: the internal one, with whatever information academia wants to pass around about students’ performance, and an external one, which provides minimal information. Already, a student’s grades cannot be shared without the student’s consent. Make it so that grades cannot (officially) be shared even with the student’s consent! An employer will have no reason to believe that a student had a 4.0 GPA, and there will be no penalty for a student’s saying they did, even if they have a 2.0. There would be no way to prove or disprove it, at least without the threat of people getting in lots of trouble if they were caught.*

This is neither deceitful nor outrageous. It is simply academia telling industry that such detailed information on students’ academic performance should not be used to make hiring decisions. I find MIT’s policy more ethically ambiguous than my proposal, since they are effectively endorsing the academia/industry disconnect and helping to perpetuate a system which makes of academia a numbers game.

My proposal might also serve to make industry more wary of academia in general, so that jobs which used not to require a college education might stop requiring it (after all, if it’s harder to tell which college graduates are best, it might make more sense to consider cheap and trainable high school graduates as well). This might result in fewer people going to college, and some colleges shutting down or consolidating. The people still going to colleges, and the colleges that stay open, might be statistically superior to the ones which would be lost. Society might recognize that reduced emphasis on postsecondary education makes reforming high-school education that much more important.

For professions like engineering, education and business - which are primarily applied - there might be more of a move to an apprenticeship-based system, where minimal training is required after high school and the majority comes through on-the-job training. As you said yourself, there is little use in making all engineers learn about PDEs before they ever get a job. Most engineers can be trained to do work, even if it involves PDEs, far more efficiently on the job. Perhaps they wouldn’t be able to pass a final from a math major’s PDEs course, but why should they be able to?

A trend has been for academia to bow to the demands of industry to produce competent workers. I feel like it’s high time for academia to make a comeback.

sakky · January 27, 2012, 12:43pm

You would have still had a degree. Plenty of employers just want a degree, without regard for what type of degree or what grades you obtained. Granted, those employers don’t offer great jobs, but hey, in this economy, at least it’s a job.

And that is in itself highly arbitrary. American Studies could decide today to vastly increase the difficulty of the major by simply deciding that a few smaller percentage of its students will actually graduate. After all, that is what American Studies PhD programs presumably do: only a tiny few people in the world are qualified for that PhD.

Hence, you seem only to be reinforcing what I said: academic standards are arbitrary.

But that doesn’t speak to the issue that just because an activity is subjective doesn’t mean that we can’t judge it. For you to say that good and bad movies exist is to concede that there is such a concept in movie-making as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and that we can actually ascertain between the two.

Like I said, not every movie receives an Academy Award. Some movies will receive Razzies. So why is it then so controversial to lower the grades of the ‘bad’ humanities students? After all, movie critics are merciless in lambasting ‘bad’ movies. Nobody is proposing to give a Best Picture Oscar to Vampires Suck.

Maybe it has to do with instructional quality. Maybe it has to do with the difficulty of whatever the exam questions are. Maybe it has to do with the incompetence of the students. It doesn’t matter. The upshot is that engineering grades, by themselves, tells you little about the absolute level of somebody’s actual engineering knowledge. Does an A mean that he knew 30% of the material on his exams, or 90%? Who knows? Grading is arbitrary.

And maybe that’s where the exam averages should be for other majors as well? If not, then why not? After all, if it works so well for engineering, why not others?

Now this is just fantastics, because between failing out of school and being allowed to re-enter it, I spent a year selling cars and about 6 months selling at Circuit City. So let me note that engineering allows you a trial period as well, and while Apple may allow you a couple of weeks to return an iPod, the drop date for most courses is much longer and the opportunities to change majors lasts for years. In both cases you can fail to see the problem during the time allotted (and with cars, this is almost certainly so), but you nonetheless have time to do so.

Anecdotally, I sold a very nice SUV to an elderly gentleman once, his family by his side. I thought it a good sale, he and his family thought it a good buy. Saw him back in the dealership 6 weeks later - he was not used to a console shifter, and accidentally drove his SUV through his garage door. His remedy? None. The dealership would not take the car back just because this problem did not occur in the hour or so he had previously spent in the vehicle, and with the $15k in depreciation caused by new-car drive-off and collision damage he would up having to choose between a car he disliked and taking a substantial financial hit.

Sounds just like college!

I was simply talking about the notion of stores providing onsite show models.

Now to your story, well, frankly, your customer should have had recourse. Otherwise, it seems to me that you’re simply interested in propagating injustice: just because one car customer got screwed, engineering students should be likewise screwed.

And even if you do believe that engineering students should be screwed, fine, then I don’t know why you’re not interested in applying the same philosophy to other majors. If engineering should fail out plenty of students, then so should the other majors.

Do you have any alternatives?

<a href=“1”>quote</a> I have no stake in making engineering a better gateway for non-engineering careers, and while I AM interested in getting more good engineers, I don’t see how grade inflation gets us there. I also see no merit in feeding more engineers to the Marshall committee when the number of engineers with GPA’s in the appropriate already far exceeds the number of prestige fellowships available, especially when compensation and funding in graduate education already substantially favors STEM fields.

(2) Even if they did not raise a formal cutoff, I would expect to see little change. Just as major graduate programs often list an official minimum, there is still often a preliminary step where some relatively junior staff member culls the group for the top X%, generally based on relatively arbitrary criteria. Or do you see many 3.5 GPA admits for MIT grad programs?

[/quote]

Your points (1) and (2) actually contradict each other. If raising engineering grades would result in little change anyway (because HR departments and grad-school adcoms will “rationally” raise their GPA requirements), then there is no reason not to do it. After all, “incompetent” engineering students will continue to not be hired or enter grad school anyway. So what’s the harm? At least they will be able to find other jobs in other fields that simply require some college degree - the same jobs that those American Studies 2.1 GPA students find.

It seems to me that what you’re actually afraid of is that HR departments are not rational - that they will not raise their GPA screens and hence some ‘incompetent’ engineers will now be hired. But that would necessitate conceding that firms do not always behave rationally.

I have no problem in having all of failing irrelevant grades being excluded.

But we do have cause. Obama and Romney - the putative Presidential nominees - have both publicly stated that the nation faces a challenge in producing sufficient engineers to meeting the threat from Asia. Hence, this seems to be an area of bipartisan concern.

aegrisomnia · January 27, 2012, 12:44pm

You conveniently chose to ignore my point, which was that students should understand how they’re doing in a course beyond what their grade tells them. Come on, students know whether they are just showing up to class or are really learning the material.

I admitted the possibility that there might be an acting course somewhere that’s being done in a non-academic way. That’s a far cry from agreeing that there’s no difference between academic and work experience!

An American Studies professor certainly has the right to hold academic failures against students; not in the sense that they get unfair treatment in a course, but in the sense that American Studies departments should have the information when deciding who to allow to take courses or pursue a degree. If some departments choose not to exercise that option, so be it.

Exactly. The department has limited resources; why should a student who has already failed at engineering be given an opportunity in lieu of a student who has not? More importantly, why should the new engineering program not be able to use information about past academic performance to predict future academic performance in whatever way they see fit? I find it entirely more reasonable to deny industry any records of past academic performance than to deny it to academia.

Yes, I believe MIT is wrong in this matter, and that this practice represents a dangerous precedent I hope other well-meaning institutions don’t use as an excuse.

sakky · January 27, 2012, 12:48pm

I find it somewhat ironic that on the one hand, you complained about my insistence that academia needs to change, and now you’re proposing that academia indeed needs to change.

But fair enough, you’ve made a fine proposal that may help the inequity of firm hiring practices. I just don’t see how it remedies the inequity in professional school admissions or major scholarships, whereas my proposal addresses all of that.

sakky · January 27, 2012, 1:03pm

I did not choose to ignore this point - I simply question how much students could possibly know about how they’re doing. Again, I recall that engineering exam where a 30% was equal to an A. What matters is not how much you know, but how much you know *relative to the average student<a href=“who%20apparently%20knew%20only%2025%%20of%20the%20material”>/i</a>, but that’s not exactly easy for any student to ascertain. Honestly - do you really expect any student to tell themselves: “Well, I understand practically nothing, but at least I understand more than the other students do, who understand even less, so I should not drop the course.”

The opposite scenario happens as well. I remember one course where an 85% was a failing grade, because the mean was a 95%. Surely those students walked into that exam feeling excellent about themselves because they thought they knew the material well. And they did. The problem is that the other students knew it even better, but how were they supposed to know that?

The bottom line is that engineering grading is determined not by how much you learned, but by how much you learned relative to what other students have learned, and that’s not trivial to know.

Is there a difference between academic and work experience? Of course! But is that difference respected today? Clearly no, which seems to be the basis for your proposal.

Fair enough. Then at least I hope that you would agree that such an attitude must inherently reduce experimentation and risk-taking. If somebody who tries engineering and fails is worse off than somebody who never even tried engineering at all (i.e. because he can’t get into the American Studies major), then that will only serve to discourage students from even trying in the first place.

Too late - Caltech does something similar regarding its enforced freshman P/F scheme (where even a D grade will convert to a Pass and I doubt that there really are that many pure F’s at Caltech). And I personally think the most egregious policy of all is run by Stanford in which practically nobody ever fails at all. {You don’t really need a policy to conceal failing grades if practically nobody ever fails in the first place.}

Nevertheless, these are some of the most prominent engineering schools in the nation and so hold outsize influence upon what other engineering schools will do.

aegrisomnia · January 27, 2012, 1:28pm

Of course I’m not saying that students should be expected to have perfect information when making decisions. Perfect information usually has a finite value, and spending more than that value to get it generally doesn’t make sense. However, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t call a mistake a mistake. Deciding to stick it out in class the student fails in is a mistake. People make mistakes. If you take risks, you run the risk of having one backfire. That’s the nature of risk.

To be clear, I’ve only been arguing that industry might be using academic credentials in a utility-diminishing way. Do engineering programs reject applicants who have demonstrated poor performance on the job, if they have a strong academic record?

Your solution makes risk-taking impossible. There’s no risk where there are no negative consequences.

Of course that doesn’t make it right, and it doesn’t mean that we should hope other schools follow suit, much less argue that they should.

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