<p>Now we are getting somewhere. Obama, Romney, etc. are touting the value of engineering (and STEM in general) careers as a way to both reduce unemployment and boost US economic productivity. There is little, if any, discussion about the risks of pursuing those careers. If they were to discuss the types of risks that we discuss here during their nationally televised addresses, it would send quite a different message to the US general public about the realities of pursuing STEM studies.</p>
<p>Actually, I just now remembered the most important reason of all for why this strategy fails miserably over and above the reasons I had already stated: those courses are not available in the semester when you need them. That is, ChemE140 is only taught once a year, during the fall semester. If you fail it, you must find some chemical engineering course to fulfill your spring ‘holding pattern’ whilst you wait for 140 to be offered again during the following fall. The problem is that both 178 and 180 are also taught once a year during the fall. Hence, they are not available to rescue you during that spring. </p>
<p>Those who would continue to dispute this are welcome to see for themselves:</p>
<p>So I return to what I said before: you have one shot to pass 140, or you’re completely thrown out of the major. Just one. And, sadly, 140 is by far the most notorious and harshest of all of the ChemE weeders.</p>
<p>Then let’s not call it ‘risk-taking’, but rather ‘experimentation’. People should be allowed to experiment with different majors without penalty. Why not? I’m allowed to go to the Apple Store and experiment with the Iphone. I can then go to the Verizon Store and experiment with the Nexus Galaxy. Is that wrong? </p>
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<p>Actually, there still are risks. You risk losing your time, and hence tuition money. That time could obviously have been better spent pursuing a major in which you would have succeeded. </p>
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<p>That’s a mistake that they’ve paid for. They’re already forfeited a bunch of their time. Just like if I try out for the Celtics and fail miserably, I’ve basically lost an entire day, along with perhaps some of my personal pride. </p>
<p>But what you’re asking people to do is to always know where they stand relative to other students in the class, and if they don’t (and fail), then their academic record should be damaged forever. Come on, have a heart. Even personal bankruptcies - a far more egregious outcome than merely failing a class - are expunged from your credit record after 7 years as a matter of law. But a failed course stays on your academic record for life. </p>
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<p>Then I’ll go on the record and say that indeed, I think that every engineering school should follow suit.</p>
Engineers are professionals that are licensed, mathematicians and physicists are not. No one is harmed if the physicist or mathematician comes with a theorem that is wrong, it is up to the engineer to use their professionally gained insight whether it is practical to use or not.</p>
<p>Also, when I meant death due to incompetence, I meant something like the Tacoma bridge. I’d love to see you bring one example in history where the incompetence of a physicist or mathematician has resulted in such a tragic accident for the general public.</p>
<p>Actually, most engineers aren’t licensed. You’d generally see civil engineers get licensed, and maybe a few ChemE/EE/MechE, but otherwise it’s pretty rare. I’ve been actually trying to look into getting a PE as a materials engineer, but it’s almost impossible since you need to have worked with supervisors who have PEs, but nobody I’ve known has actually had a PE within my own field.</p>
Wait - haven’t you been arguing that without a 3.0 engineers cannot even GET a job? Oh, I see - we need to inflate grades so that 1.9 GPA engineers can get some mythical job that (a) requires a degree, (b) will take someone at the absolute bottom of the academic barrel, and (c) still provides better employment then can be had without any degree at all. What jobs are these exactly?</p>
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Actually, I am pretty sure that this is NOT what those PhD programs do - they admit as many students as they can fund with RA and TA spots (i.e., a few) along with as many others as are qualified, managable, and willing to pay their own way (i.e. not many at all), presuming the university allows it (since many will not).</p>
<p>For that matter, ANY program could make itself harder just by increasing the amount of material covered or by placing harder constraints on it - but there should be a valid reason for doing so. If the school, program, and accrediting bodies feel that a certain degree represents an “adequate” level of understanding, I see no reason to make it either easier OR harder, especially not to just fulfill someone else’s idea of “fairness”.</p>
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Not what I am saying at all - while we CAN and do judge artistic products all the time, opinions vary considerably and there are many different measures of success. For example, I think Paul Verhoeven’s “Starship Troopers” is absolute garbage, but that doesn’t mean that it didn’t make a ton of money. So no, “we” cannot ascertain between the two, because while YOU might like the African Queen, I think it is the only truly terrible movie that Hepburn or Bogie ever made.</p>
<p>In many ways, this is my point about grading subjective courses - not only is it much harder to be wholly wrong (something that an engineering student can do with a misplaced “-”), but it is harder still to justify if it if someone makes a stink.</p>
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Tell yourself that, if it helps. Grading in most engineering courses at most schools is hardly arbitrary, and employers and grad programs have a pretty good amount of confidence in what those grades mean, even if you struggle with it.</p>
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Going round in circles, but I have no evidence that average grades in other majors aren’t in the same ballpark - remember that the difference between engineering GPA’s and humanities GPA’s is 0.2-0.3 - don’t think that engineers are getting C’s where everyone else is getting straight A’s.</p>
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And as I discussed, many schools are offering “freshman seminars” as “onsite show models”. Eventually, you actually have to issue grades.</p>
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What recourse should he have had? There was no problem with the product sold to him, he damaged it because he was not able to operate it correctly. If you dropped your iPod, should Apple arbitrarily give you a new one? Likewise, in college there aren’t any secrets, and there are many opportunities to save yourself from the horrors of a poorly-chosen major or a bad grade, and eventually you just need to acknowledge that a student has waited too long and done to much damage for them to say it was the college’s fault.</p>
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Again, where are these jobs, exactly? And how desirable are they, compared to those available to college drop outs?</p>
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No, I am not particularly concerned about incompetent engineers being hired - I am sure that it is already happening to some small extent, and do not think that allowing a 1.9GPA engineer to graduate will change the number of people working as engineers at all. Nor do I think that firms “always” behave rationally, although I do believe that they generally behave rationally - while dropping their “arbitrary” standards may increase their pool and add a few engineers that they might otherwise have overlooked, the value of adding those engineers might be less than the costs of sorting through all the applicants without those “arbitrary” standards to reduce the pool. I recommend you ask your friendly neighborhood HR rep.</p>
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Sorry, I should have also specified that you need cause AND an actual effective remedy. I think you have a remedy that would have no positive effects and probably a few negative ones.</p>
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How about these:</p>
<p>(1) Change educational standards at the k-12 levels to place a stronger emphasis on science and math. Increase the presence of “fun” engineering systems and ideas in classrooms, especially at the high school level.</p>
<p>(2) Increase scholarships and grants for those who pursue STEM degrees and go into STEM jobs - those who decide to then go to law school can pay them back, with interest. This would be in line with a number of current scholarships that dictate service in a particular area after graduation.</p>
<p>(3) Change patent law to dictate that a certain percentage of patented inventions and protected trade secrets (40%?) are permanently assigned to the actual inventors, ensuring that engineers and scientists CAN make the kind of money that makes people drool. This one is complicated, but (I think) managable, and possible the only way to dictate increased pay for engineers. </p>
<p>And the big one…</p>
<p>(4) Change culture. Right now, we have Jersey Shore and shows about Kim Kardashian, and we wonder why no one wants to do a real job with real utility for reasonable pay? I love the Big Bang Theory, but it does nothing for the image of engineers. Good luck with this one, though. Perhaps someone could do a study, tracking the careers of high school students over 20 years, comparing the “nerds” with the “jocks” and such.</p>
<p>Anyway, there are a few off the top of my head.</p>
Yes, but you and all engineers had to take specific courses and meet specific requirements set by the ABET in order to get your degree, while there isn’t any board that standardizes math and physics degrees. While you meet the qualifications to sit for the P.eng exam and be awarded the title due to meeting the criteria set by the ABET for your degree, it is entirely possible for a physics major to get through a program without ever taking classes like fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, classical mechanics, and even PDE’s (there are some programs).</p>
<p>It is completely the responsibility of the engineer to use a mathematical theorem or scientific theory and assess whether it is sound or not.</p>
I’m going to repost a comment I made earlier because it has not been addressed but remains relevant:</p>
<p>“If the content of engineering programs is unrelated to engineering work, why do engineering employers demand employees who have completed such programs? If [sakky’s] characterization of engineering programs is correct, then why are STEM graduates important to the US economy? Perhaps the process of achieving an X.xx GPA in an engineering program develops something important or useful.”
I don’t know about that. It seems reasonable to me that biological constraints might exist that make mastery of some subjects more challenging than others for an average cross-section of the population.</p>
<p>There is a school of thought that specific course content aside, the rigors of an engineering program (and to some extent, any bachelor’s or higher degree program) prepares one for engineering work better than if no degree had been earned. Some reasons given are that it shows the ability to do analytical and logical work; the curricula form the basis for doing work in a wide variety of fields; such candidates will have the motivation and perseverance to perform such work.</p>
<p>An opposing school of thought wants the job candidate that is ready and able to hit the ground running. They want candidates who have been fully trained to do the job they are hired for. In this case, an engineering degree is fine, if all of the subject matter has been covered. Otherwise, any combination of education and/or experience, even self-taught, will do. Someone who needs to be trained, or even who could learn the job on their own time, is considered less valuable.</p>
<p>What I said is that they can’t get the better engineering jobs. At the very least they can compete for the same jobs that the American Studies graduates with the 2.1 GPA’s can obtain. </p>
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<p>Actually, it’s the ones that you pointed out (and derided): the low-level labor jobs that those low-performing liberal arts grads obtain. However lowly those jobs may be, that’s still better than no job at all - and let’s face it, without a college degree nowadays, you may well end up with no job at all. </p>
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<p>Um, that is actually what those programs do. Sure, those programs may admit however many PhD students that their funding may allow, but that doesn’t mean that all of them will obtain PhD’s. In fact, generally the majority of incoming humanities PhD students will never complete the degree. </p>
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<p>And that’s precisely my question: exactly what is the definition of ‘adequate’? Apparently, during the 1960’s, the level of ‘adequacy’ - at least within the HASS disciplines - was predicated on whatever was necessary to provide students with draft deferments to avoid the Vietnam War - a deeply dubious determinant of adequacy. After all, why should the fact that the nation was fighting an unpopular war that plenty of college students were trying to avoid have anything to do with the level of ‘adequate’ humanities knowledge necessary for a degree?</p>
<p>But be that as it may, that’s a historical fact. And we have to adjust to its consequences: specifically the fact that, however inadvertently, those HASS majors have developed historical inertia in being easier majors than others. </p>
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<p>Yet we still do it anyway. Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer can complain all they want that they’re “unfairly” not receiving Best Picture Oscars, but we’re still not going to give them one. So why is the Oscar committee apparently so capable of ‘judging’ movies, but humanities professors cannot?</p>
<p>And indeed, they actually do… for their PhD students. Like I said, you can’t just slap together some random literary analysis and then demand that Harvard grant you a PhD in English on the grounds that nobody can truly judge the quality of humanities work anyway. If you don’t meet the standards that the Harvard English department demands from its PhD students - however arbitrary those standards may be - they’re simply not going to grant you a PhD, even if you spend decades trying. If they, in their wisdom, decide that your dissertation doesn’t pass muster, then you don’t get a PhD, no matter how loudly you complain. </p>
<p>So again, why are humanities departments so capable of harshly judging PhD students, but not undergrads? </p>
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<p>Tell yourself that if it helps. After all - could you tell what the grading meant? If somebody got an A in engineering, what exactly does it mean? Did he obtain a 30% on his exams, or a 90%? You have no idea. </p>
<p>I think what you mean to say is that the scoring is not arbitrary - but the grading of those scores (hence whether a 30% translates into an A or an F) is arbitrary. This seems to be a notion that you conceded yourself in a prior post, but you’re apparently struggling with it now. </p>
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<p>Ironic that you would use such an example, because Apple actually probably will, as long as the Ipod is under warranty. After all, Apple is interested in keeping you as a long-term customer. </p>
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<p>Seems to me that 0.2-0.3 is itself an important difference. </p>
<p>But if you don’t think so, then you should have no problem in removing that difference. After all, it’s not an important difference to you anyway, so why object to something that isn’t important? Either that, or you have to concede that you do think the difference is important. </p>
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<p>I never said that you never had to issue grades. What I said is why do we have to insist on grading people who decide to leave the major anyway? </p>
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<p>They’re the same jobs that you pointed out (and derided). But they’re still better than no jobs at all. Let’s face it - however bad the jobs may be for those American Studies 2.1 GPA students, they’re still better than the jobs available for those with no degrees at all. </p>
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<p>Ok then, so if that’s your position, then it seems that you have no reason to object to inflating eng grades to match HASS. After all - you said it yourself - some incompetent engineers are already being hired anyway. If the 1.99 GPA engineering student being allowed to graduate won’t really change the # of engineers working anyway, then why the objection? </p>
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<p>Then if the firm was truly rational, they would simply raise their screens to avoid the increased search costs. But you already said that they aren’t really rational anyway. </p>
<p>To be clear, I’m not insulting HR. I recognize that HR has the difficult task of ascertaining the quality of human capital, under pain of being blamed for a bad hire. Hence, one way for HR to protect itself in the inevitable internal political battles of any firm is to simply implement a GPA screen simply as a CYA scheme: they can then point to the existence of the screen as a way to offload responsibility for a terrible hire to the school. {Hence, they can defend themselves by saying that the terrible employee had good grades, and it’s the university’s fault for giving him good grades, not the fault of HR.} That’s entirely rational for the HR department as a internal political tool, but not necessarily rational for the firm. </p>
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<p>I already said that it has important positive effects: it allows those poorly performing engineering students to at least graduate. Sure, they won’t get top jobs, but at least they’ll have college degrees. That’s better than no degree at all. After all, we give the 2.1 American Studies students degrees for doing basically nothing. </p>
<p>More importantly, it allows highly talented, but risk-averse, people to try engineering. </p>
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<p>And what exactly would these negative effects be? You said yourself that we already produce some incompetent engineering graduates anyway. </p>
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<p>I would argue that engineers are the backbone of innovation in the economy. After all, both Romney and Obama have publicly touted the need for the nation to produce more engineers. This therefore seems to be an area of rare bipartisan agreement. </p>
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<p>I would argue it’s the same reason that plenty of jobs nowadays (unfortunately) demand a college degree for even the most menial job, even if the degree had nothing to do with the responsibilities of the job. Engineering employers can demand engineering degrees because it’s a cheap way for them to screen for work ethic and talent. Whether you actually learned anything useful during the curriculum is unimportant. </p>
<p>After all, why do investment banks and consulting firms often times recruit at Harvard - even for humanities majors? Seems to me that the reason is that the Harvard brand allows them to screen for students who come from elite social/family networks and who have displayed general intellectual talent and work ethic. </p>
<p>But the job screening function - if that is all that a college provides - is a deeply wasteful use of society’s resources, because all you’re doing is simply distributing human capital without increasing the total amount of human capital. </p>
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<p>If that’s the case, then we could simply increase the challenge of those other majors. For example, if American Studies - as currently taught- is simply too easy for the average cross-section of the population, then those departments could simply assign more books to read and more essays to write (and, more importantly, those who refuse to do the extra work will get an F).</p>
<p>I’ve not read the whole thread but just find this ridiculous. What next, med school is too hard to get into and so we don’t have enough doctors?</p>
<p>There are some things in life that are very difficult and only a subset of people that can master them get to do them. Engineering is one of those things.</p>
<p>Sakky, I think you break the record for the very longest message I’ve never seen in four years on CC. </p>
<p>Is this your passion Sakky? Are you on the spectrum? I don’t mean that as an insult but it would help me to understand your singular drive a bit better.</p>
<p>While off-topic, frankly, actually, yes. One of the greatest criticisms directed at the AMA is that they have colluded with medical schools to keep enrollments artificially low in order to maintain scarcity. </p>
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<p>Yet isn’t it ironic that realm of software-engineering/information-technology - arguably the most innovative sector in the economy - is so prominently staffed by people who never even graduated from college at all (or in some cases, not even from high school)? Nobody disputes the technical difficulty of that industry, yet I wonder how different the world might be if Bill Gates was not allowed to work in engineering because he didn’t have a degree. {Maybe the world might have been better off, but clearly he would not have been better off.} </p>
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<p>Improving the pace of innovation of this nation is indeed a passion of mine, and I have become increasingly convinced that the differential grading schemes amongst the tech vs. non-technical college majors is a detrimental factor. I suspect that we would enjoy greater innovation if students were less intimidated by the daunting engineering grading scales. </p>
<p>One counterargument is that those students who might be attracted to engineering if we changed the engineering grading scales are people who aren’t going to work as engineers, but will rather shift to other fields anyway. But even if that was the case, I suspect that the pace of innovation would still improve. For example, right now, such a person might be frightened by engineering because he wants to ‘protect’ his GPA to maximize his chances of becoming an investment banker. If he chose to major in engineering (under a more relaxed grading scale), he might still become an investment banker. But that’s fine, as he may end up in a banking position where he advises tech firms on mergers and acquisitions, and his engineering background would then provide him with better knowledge of tech firms’ needs. After all, right now, plenty of terrible tech mergers occur. {For example, Alcatel and Lucent should never have merged.}</p>
<p>Sure, but it also doesn’t make it not true. Furthermore, there seems to be growing social science evidence that supports the notion that more engineering human capital tends to foster greater innovation. </p>
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<p>Then firms are perfectly welcome to raise their screens if the program becomes less brutal. For example, if eng firms nowadays will only consider hiring engineering students who pass (hence have 2.0 GPA’s), then after the programs become less brutal, eng firms are welcome to respond by hiring only those eng students with 2.5 GPA’s. </p>
<p>But at least those with 2.3 GPA’s will then have a degree, which will give them a better chance of finding some job, even if not an engineering job. After all, American Studies students with 2.3’s are still granted degrees. </p>
<p>{But of course all of that presumes that firms actually behave economically rationally - and there seem to be plenty of reasons to believe that they do not.} </p>
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<p>But that’s the real question - are they selecting for the right type of student? Right now, engineering programs tend to select against the most ambitious, career-oriented type of student - who are precisely the students who are most concerned with GPA. Which is as they must, for unfortunately plenty of other career pathways fixate upon GPA, which compels those students to fixate upon it as well. </p>
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<p>I would return to the same point made before: miseducation in HASS topics has historically proven to be just as dangerous as miseducation in engineering. Ethnic conflicts, racial discrimination, fascism, social darwinism all can be traced back to a fundamental miseducation in HASS. One can also view our current financial straits as a fundamental miseducation in finance and economics, whether by individual bankers who constructed incompetent investments that devastated the economy, or by the investors who provided those bankers with the capital necessary to make those incompetent investments.</p>