I have noticed a disturbing trend on CC lately. A student will say, “I made a bad grade in calculus. I understood the concepts, but I just made simple mistakes and the professor wasn’t very forgiving.” This really bothers me, because the real world is even less forgiving! A “simple mistake” was the reason for the Kansas City Hyatt collapse in 1986 (google it - a lot of people died). Students need to understand that engineers are almost ALWAYS rushed, sometimes even more than students on exams. And the client is constantly changing things. Attention to detail is critical!
Students, you should THANK your professors for being unforgiving. They’re trying to prepare you for the real world.
While I agree with your general point, I object to your use of the Hyatt example because I think it’s hyperbole. From [the wiki page:](Hyatt Regency walkway collapse - Wikipedia)
Not a simple mistake. The “gross negligence” charge was spot on.
I would also like to add to my previous point that most of those mistakes that people say are “simple mistakes that an unfair professor took a lot of points off for” are not so simple, and that the student doesn’t generally understand the concepts as well as they think they do. A mistake that leads to a bad grade is generally either not one but many small mistakes (which is bad and something you should fix) or a concept you didn’t understand that you don’t even realize you didn’t understand, which is also bad. A lot of the times, if you think that the issue is simple then you have misunderstood the problem.
In hindsight, I would say that I have only ever had one professor, out of all of them, who was particularly bad at grading. Said professor acted out of laziness, and punished small, early mistakes more than later, extremely severe mistakes on exams. Most of the “small mistakes” that people complain that they were punished for, are not so small. Most of the time, though certainly far from always, the professor knows better than the student.
Trivializing and undervaluing details is a mistake. But it’s not a simple mistake.
Simple mistakes do cost money, cause projects to fail and all kinds of other bad things. Of course, it is not just the simple mistake that does all these things but an inadequate review process (that almost every engineering project goes thru).
The thing about most simple mistakes is that with a few simple checks, those mistakes should be caught. The first thing one must do with any problem is estimate the answer. Am I close to not meeting requirements or am I in “fat city”. That answer can help dictate the way the problem is solved. In the classroom, it helps to identify those incorrect answers.
If I were to be a prof grading tests, the first thing I would look at would be if the incorrect answer should have been obvious that it was incorrect? IF it was obvious and still left to stand, then, of course, I’d mark it down big time. If the error was small as to be within some margin of estimate error, then I might cut you some slack.
In the working world, engineering errors usually get caught but do cost money to fix and drag a companies reputation down. Learning to correct your own errors before they get out into the wild is a good skill to cultivate.
In short: there are more incentives to rush, make mistakes, and do a poor job than there are to do a thorough and complete job.
As a current student, I’ve seen this from my peers too. I think it has a lot to do with diminishing returns. If you have to spend 2x the amount of work to get an A than a B is it really worth it? So it’s natural for students to want to gain as many points as they can for less work.
It’s a balance between grades and learning. Student A could have a difficult teacher, learn more in the class, but ultimately receives low marks in the class. Student B may do close to no work, make many mistakes, and earn high marks. Unfortunately, many students would choose the former if given the choice. Factor in the competitiveness for internships and the need for high GPAs to maintain scholarships.
In particular, I’ve had one or two teachers who insist on never giving out high grades. This essentially creates a need for perfectionism which might be just as counter productive. It’s really hard to want to compliment a teacher when you’ve never gotten over 60% of your lab reports despite spending the whole weekend working on the project.
Just trying to throw some counter-arguments out into the mix. Students are human too, and make mistakes.
I am semi-retired now but was a manager within a large aerospace company. When I was interviewing students for jobs within the company I was always looking for the person who really liked doing engineering. Not someone who was seeing how many points they could get for less work. After all, you were going to be doing engineering for 40 hours a week for quite a long time. You must enjoy the work or you won’t stick with it. When you figure in your time learning to do the work (you only really have the basics coming out of college, and there is so much more to learn), and senior engineering time to teach you; the company will have invested quite a bit in every new hire that comes along. We would be looking for someone who was going to with us for a long time in order to reap the benefits of the money invested.
The need to strive for perfectionism IS NOT COUNTERPRODUCTIVE, it is the rule of the day. What do I tell the spouse of an astronaut that dies in a launch failure; Sorry, but I was only trying for a “B”.
Working twice as much for an A as a B is entirely reasonable and is well within what an engineer should strive for, because an A represents a solid mastery of the material while a B represents perhaps a weak mastery of the material. On the other hand, if an A+ takes twice as much work as an A then it’s probably not worth the effort and it’s counterproductive to put in that much work. Efficiency is an important skill too.
Not in every class. Come on. 4.0s are rare. Something has to give if you want to have time for something besides schoolwork (which, contrary to popular belief, you DO, because even though it somehow makes you a ~worse engineer~ you’d go insane if you didn’t do other things every once in a while).
Like in real world engineering work, you should strive for a full success in your projects (the “A level” which may still be significantly lower than perfection). Obviously it won’t always work out, neither in college nor in the real world. But if it isn’t the goal, if you deliberately put in a subpar effort because it’s too hard (and being able to avoid biting off more than you can chew is an important skill too), then that’s not the sign of a good engineer.
I think the original message is to work carefully with accuracy and precision. Dig in to your problem sets. Make sure you have a thorough understanding of how and why an approach works … or doesn’t work. Consider each sub-step in your problem solving and ask yourself whether the intermediate answer makes sense. Engineering is detailed work. Sometimes, the details are in a calculation. Sometimes, the details are in a manufacturing process. Whatever the case, little mistakes cost money and can impact safety. This is meant to be helpful advice.
I also agree with VMT in post #10. However, the original post was commenting on the attitude that “why should I work hard when only a B is necessary”. That attitude also really bothers me and I would have little regard and little use of any engineer that had that attitude.
Grading in engineering (vs in High School or other liberal arts majors) is much more rigorous, because understanding the key concepts is not enough, for all of the reasons stated above. Often this can be a shock to a new student and feel “unfair”.
On the other hand, I’m sure must of us have had classes where only 1 or 2 folks may get that “A” and the rest of us are just trying to survive it.
One summer (back in the 80’s), I had one Professor, teaching a basic Statics class (with about 90 students), announce on the first day of class, his policy of awarding anyone that got an A in his class with a $100 bill and a glowing letter of recommendation. He didn’t part with any of his money that term…