<p>sakky, you just don’t get it. Just because you think most engineers can’t take a derivative (even though my 85 year-old grandpa was doing some of my more difficult Calc II problems for fun 20 years after retiring from a long engineering career) doesn’t mean a strong conceptual base is not extremely important for someone who applies science principles to solve real-world problems. I think it’s the difference between your mom cooking from a recipe and a master chef creating the recipe.</p>
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<p>Where did I say that any practicing engineer has to do that? Even in academia, it isn’t common to do that. This is a straw man.</p>
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<p>The truth of this is entirely dependent on the professor teaching. It is not a hallmark of highly theoretical curricula. Some of my best experiences in classes came from those taught by professors that gave difficult homework that really challenged you to expand your understanding of the material while their tests were designed not to fail you, but to genuinely test your knowledge of the fundamentals. After all, if you know the fundamentals, you may not remember the exact advanced formulae later down the road, but you will have a much better intuition into the solution of a given problem, even if it takes a little bit of digging to come up with the literature to prove it since that was long ago. On an exam like that, I would argue that many practicing engineers may not get an A, but they would pass.</p>
<p>Again, I stress that the important thing is fundamentals. From them all other things can be derived. In practice, even that is unnecessary of course, as you have books. The real value is in that physical intuition you build by learning the fundamentals can help lead you to better solutions and lead you to them more quickly than someone who has to go back and look everything up repeatedly.</p>
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<p>Engineering, in its most basic sense, is the application of physics and other hard sciences toward the solutions to practical problems. For that, you need to know the basics of the hard science as well as the more practical things like manufacturing.</p>
<p>But this begs the question, what practical skills do you think engineers should have? Should they be able to operation a lathe or CNC mill and do that work? They would be surpassed easily by an actual machinist, making anything beyond just knowing how those things work pretty useless. Should they be on the manufacturing floor tightening bolts? You don’t need an education for that. Should they be welding? Get a welding certification if you want to do that; as long as you know the metallurgy behind welding and how it affects the strength of your part, you are fine. The bottom line is, engineers aren’t meant to be the ones on the manufacturing floor. There are specialists for that, and they generally don’t need a 4-year degree. If you want to be more towards that end, engineering technology is probably a better fit.</p>
<p>The problem is, ET degrees are looked down on and not many people do them comparatively, so full engineers end up filling jobs for which ET would have sufficed. What we ought to do is promote the ET degrees to fill roles that need not be as based in theory. At the very least, it will take some of the people out of engineering programs and give them more “practical” ET degrees and employers will stop complaining that engineers are not trained in enough practical skills. At best, the remaining engineers go on to jobs where their strength in the fundamentals is valued (most engineering jobs anyway) and can flourish there. In addition, if played the right way, you could even use it as a way to help raise the profile of engineers and lure some of the top graduates back away from the financial sector.</p>
<p>You personally cite top engineering candidates leaving the engineering industries for finance as a problem, yet the ones that do this are typically coming from the more theoretical programs. There seems to be a dichotomy in your logic.</p>
<p>The bottom line is that most practicing engineers will never need to sit down and just start deriving equations and will have books to grab whatever formulae they need. However, learning the scientific fundamentals correctly is still an important part of an engineering education due to the sense of physical intuition it provides - long a hallmark of good engineers. After all, they can pay people with less training and who command a smaller salary to turn the nuts and bolts and do the welding. Engineers should be more making design decisions based on the scientific principles of which they allegedly have a grasp.</p>
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<p>Is it really? Then that means that many engineering curricula are populated by strawmen, because that is exactly what you are forced to do in many engineering courses, especially the notorious weeders. If you can’t, then you flunk out of the program. </p>
<p>So then, pray tell, what exactly is the point of flunking out engineering students who can’t complete a task that, as you admitted yourself, practicing engineers never actually do? </p>
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<p>And I have no issue with students being tested and weeded on fundamental intuition. </p>
<p>The problem is that what you described is a fantasy world that does not comport with what actually happens. As I’m sure that we all painfully remember, you’re not going to score many points on an engineering exam if all you can demonstrate is fundamental intuition, however defined. Rather, you score points by providing the specific derivational steps that lead you to the specific numerical value that the exam’s answer key calls for. If you don’t score enough points, then you fail. It doesn’t matter how much intuition you had. All that matters is how many points you scored. </p>
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<p>Not at all, because the finance profession is clearly not hiring those engineers for their theoretical knowledge (for after all, the finance profession also hires plenty of humanities graduates). This is a case of mistaken correlation. What the finance profession is hiring for is school prestige, and it just so happens that the most prestigious engineering schools - the MIT’s and Stanford’s of the world - also just so happen to be the most theoretical. But if MIT and Stanford immediately abolished their undergraduate engineering theory and replaced it with highly practical fare (while maintaining their selectivity and reputation), the finance industry would still poach plenty of their engineering students because they would still carry the MIT/Stanford brand. </p>
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<p>Oh believe me, I think I “get it” just fine. </p>
<p>And again, nobody is saying that a strong conceptual base is important. But that is not what is tested. You can’t just walk into an engineering final exam and expect to score well simply because you understand the ‘concepts’. As explained above, you have to demonstrate the ability to derive specific equations in order to arrive at specific numerical answers that the exam wants you to calculate…and if you can’t, then you flunk. Engineering curricula have therefore effectively then been subverted into a branch of mathematics: the highest-performing engineering students who garner the best grades at the top-ranked engineering programs and are therefore presumably the most desirable engineering hires (as many engineering firms simply won’t interview you if you cannot pass a certain GPA threshold) are not actually the students who have the best engineering conceptual base, but rather the students who are the best mathematical acrobats.</p>
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<p>And the key operative word in that paragraph is ‘allegedly’. That then raises the question: do they in fact have a grasp of those scientific principles? Or are they simply ‘equation-jockeys’? I would submit that the current engineering education system produces far more of the latter than the former.</p>
<p>Guys, rather than argue generalities, let’s use a specific example. Consider the following midterm in Berkeley’s Chemical Engineering Fluid Mechanics (weeder) course. Note, the course is required; you must pass this course to become eligible for the later coursework in the program. </p>
<p><a href=“https://tbp.berkeley.edu/examfiles/cheme/cheme150A-sp11-mt2-Ghilarducci-soln.pdf[/url]”>https://tbp.berkeley.edu/examfiles/cheme/cheme150A-sp11-mt2-Ghilarducci-soln.pdf</a></p>
<p>Seems to me that out of the entire exam, the only portions where a general conceptual knowledge of engineering could be used to successfully answer a question are certain subparts of question 3. The vast majority of the exam requires that you provide specific (and long) derivations of equations to arrive at the final answers, and to complete them all within a total 80-minute time frame. For example, question (2f) asks you to specifically derive the expression for the equivalent pressure distribution of the system described in the diagram. No, not a general conceptual fundamental view of the system in the diagram, but rather the specific analytical closed-form function of the distribution, which must be derived step-by-step. As you can see from the answer, that derivation is far from trivial.</p>
<p>So now I ask you guys - how many practicing engineers do you think could actually pass this exam if it were given to them right now? Heck, even if we gave those practicing engineers the entire allotted 80 minutes just to complete (2f) alone, how many would actually be able to answer it?</p>
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<p>That is hardly unique to engineering, or any subject where closed book final exams are normally given.</p>
<p>One could argue that real world work (including academic research) in any subject is not a closed book test; the best practitioners of the subject may or may not know the answer off the top of their heads, but will know how to go about solving the problem. For example, you may not know how to integrate some obscure equation that you need in order to solve your problem (but you can look it up), but if you do not know what calculus means, you may not even get that far.</p>
<p>Of course, this means that open book final exams would be more realistic. But they tend to be less popular with instructors and students (instructors have to come up with more difficult problems, and students seem to fear difficult problems on tests), and time limitations for final exams may make it difficult to create a final exam with several good open book problems.</p>
<p>Just wondering what makes you “not a fan” of said subjects?? I’ve learned that no one likes that of which they do not understand. I used to hate calculus, now it is tolerable… on occasion it can even be somewhat enjoyable! Physics never seemed “fun” to me, but once I got into the classroom and started learning, it actually does seem pretty neat.</p>
<p>Then again, there are those among us who were simply born with an inherent passion for ______ subject; those are the people that always have and always will love that particular subject(s).</p>
<p>Essentially, my message is this: don’t dismiss entire subjects whimsically. Instead, give them time to grow on you. As you pick up the material, you might end up enjoying some of the classes!</p>
<p><strong>this however is my experience… I realize it may not relate to you at all. But it might!</strong></p>
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<p>Clearly that comment was referring to practicing engineers, since that is what you were talking about when I responded. Even professors rarely sit around deriving equations. They know the fundamentals and they know the equations in their niche area. Except in special cases, they don’t go around deriving new things for their work very often.</p>
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<p>The point is that to be a good engineer, you need to have a solid foundation in the subject, especially the fundamental principles. These fundamental principles certainly don’t get used directly very often in practice, but they sure are at the heart of nearly every problem. If you have a good grasp on those, you ought to be able to tackle nearly every technical problem you come across, and for the ones you can’t, you likely know where to head to get the solution. If you can’t pass exams on the fundamentals, then you have no business being an engineer. For example, in fluids, if you don’t understand the basics of momentum and mass conservation, then you shouldn’t be an engineer that deals with fluids. However, if you struggle with deriving and solving the Blasius equations, that is much more forgivable. Of course that leads into the next point.</p>
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<p>Of course there are professors that like to flex their egos and give tests on the most obscure things, and those professors ought to be reprimanded for it and ashamed of themselves. However, this isn’t a problem with curricula so much as it is a problem with the fact that many professors are a bit egotistical in nature.</p>
<p>Be that as it may, my experience in both undergraduate studies and graduate studies has much more closely mirrored my “fantasy world,” as you call it. Of course there were some really terrible professors who just wanted to make exams as hard as they could, but in general, I had a fair number of really good professors who gave fair tests where anyone who had a firm understanding of the fundamentals could pass, and going beyond that would be what got you into the range to get an A in the course (which is how it ought to work, in my opinion). I also feel like this approach was (is) more common in younger faculty. The older faculty are the ones that I observed being more sticklers for derivations and obscure formulae, so I suppose that does bode well for the future.</p>
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<p>I both agree and disagree with this. The thing is, there is a reason these schools have gotten to the level of prestige that they have, and it comes from the average prowess of their faculty and graduates. The nature of theoretical science and engineers dictates that to master them, one necessarily become very good at a certain complementary set of skills. Most relevant in this case are the mathematical tools of data analysis. The purely practical side of engineering has little use for these sorts of skills such as Fourier analysis, proper orthogonal decomposition, Hilbert and Hilbert-Huang tranforms and the like.</p>
<p>The financial firms like engineers for their problem solving methodology, which could just as easily be gleaned from the practical side of things, and for being familiar with techniques such as those (and others of course). Familiarity with those does not come from the purely practical. If MIT et al. suddenly dropped the theoretical side of their curriculum, sure their graduates would still be hired for these positions based on their clout, but if they weren’t familiar with these skills that the financial firms covet anymore, even that would only carry them so far. The game is about money, and if the graduates stop bringing in such huge sums of money, you better believe the financial firms will move on to greener pastures. In other words, I would argue that there is a correlation between the theoretical nature programs such as MIT and their graduates’ hiring into the financial sector.</p>
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<p>This actually hits on one pretty strong opinion of mine. I don’t think a significant number of engineers have that strong grasp of the fundamentals that they should. Why?</p>
<p>We constantly hear about how we need more people in STEM fields. The problem is, while the ‘S’ and the ‘M’ jobs are straightforward, the ‘T’ and ‘E’ jobs essentially both get covered by engineering degrees, when really it should amount to the different between engineering and engineering technology degrees. What you end up with is a group of engineering graduates that tends to be overqualified for ‘T’ and underqualified for ‘E’, which leads to the dichotomy between what we hear about having a shortage of qualified STEM workers while we also see unemployed new graduates (though far fewer than most other fields, admittedly).</p>
<p>In other words, I think both sets of degrees need fundamentals, but we ought to do more to promote the ET degrees and teach them more things on the practical side and leave the traditional engineers to the more theoretical side. Of course engineers should be able to do practical things as well, but for people who only are interested in the practical, we ought to have a much stronger emphasis on ET degrees. That would also remove a chunk of current engineering students who are in it only for a stable career with a reasonably high salary and often just skate by without grasping the material fully and put them in a major more in line with their interests. It also lets engineering programs cater less to the people that should be more geared toward ET and focus on the more traditional engineering curriculum (without completely neglecting practicality, of course).</p>
<p>Honestly, that exam you posted doesn’t seem to be too bad in my opinion. They have a lot of writing for the answers, but I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that solving it correctly wouldn’t require quite as much as what they have. The answer key, of course, must be as complete as possible to help people out. I could honestly imagine certain situations in practice where any of those problems could be useful to know how to do.</p>
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<p>Indeed, but engineering (supposedly) differentiates itself by its real world practicality, for otherwise, engineering really would just be little more than just another branch of math or physics. While most of mathematics may not be practical, mathematicians don’t claim that it is. </p>
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<p>Indeed, but that doesn’t obviate the basic truth: engineering programs are selecting not for the ability to demonstrate fundamental conceptual knowledge, but for the ability to perform rapid mathematical acrobatics. For example, even if you knew how to derive the equations demanded by the example exam above, if you can’t complete those derivations in the allotted time period (and you have only ~25 minutes per question), then you don’t score the points. And if you don’t score enough points, then you flunk the exam.</p>
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<p>And yet they’ll demand that the students do exactly that, on pain of flunking.</p>
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<p>And yet those professors seem to be precisely the ones who occupy faculty positions at the top-ranked engineering schools - the very positions that plenty of other faculty at lower-ranked schools wish that they had. Nobody is coming to reprimand them, and they certainly feel no sense of shame. </p>
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<p>Indeed, I agree that that is how they obtained their level of prestige. But that’s different from how they would keep their prestige. Once a school attains elite status, it’s practically impossible for it to lose that status, because that level of status serves to sustain itself - a school like Harvard becomes known as elite, which then tends to draw the “best” students and faculty, which then serves to further bolster Harvard’s elite brand, which tends to draw still more of the “best” students and faculty, in perpetuity. Curricular changes then become irrelevant, because people are drawn to Harvard not for the curriculum, but for the brand. </p>
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<p>Yet that logic is undermined by the fact - like I pointed out - that those financial firms also hire plenty of humanities graduates for analyst positions, as long as those humanities graduates also come from elite-branded schools. Heck even MIT’s own (admittedly few) humanities graduates often times also garner financial services jobs. Those guys obviously don’t seem to be hurt by their lack of theoretical engineering training.</p>
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<p>Yeah, well, I won’t hold my breath waiting for that to happen. The reality is that, right now, the (supposedly) most prestigious engineering programs - which are touted as the gateways to the best engineering jobs - also strongly tend to be the ones that are the most theoretical. </p>
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<p>Again, the issue is not regarding whatever fundamental knowledge that exam may or may not measure. The question is, how many practicing engineers could, at this very moment, answer those exam questions to completion? I would submit that it would be very few.</p>
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<p>I can count the number of time I was asked to perform a full derivation of anything on an exam in my undergraduate studies at Illinois, a school typically considered to be a top engineering school with a good theoretical basis.</p>
<p>The good news is, the elderly retire (or die) eventually, so if there really is a trend for the younger professors to take this better approach, then give it time as change is already on its way. If not, then I don’t know how you could realistically tackle the problem short of trying to get the tenure committees to force it on the younger, untenured faculty. To an extent, I think they are starting to do exactly this.</p>
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<p>It wouldn’t be as difficult to enact this as one may think as long as someone could convince a couple of politicians it is the right idea.</p>
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<p>The “best” engineering jobs you refer to are often the ones that typically require the most theoretical knowledge. Of course, “best” is a subjective term, but for someone who is doing engineering for engineering, the “best” is usually things that involve lots of design and creating new things from new ideas. That requires theory, at which point you hand your design to a technician who then figures out the best way to actually build the thing.</p>
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<p>And I would point out that to pass that exam, you don’t necessarily need to answer each question to completion and that many practicing engineers that do fluids-related work would be able to pass that exam, though not necessarily get a top score. I would also argue that nearly 100% of engineers in academia could pass that exam with a good to great score.</p>
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<p>Consider yourself blessed. Especially consider yourself blessed relative to all of the other former engineering students who flunked out because they couldn’t do lightning-fast derivations. </p>
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<p>It’s not clear to me what the impetus would be for doing so. Let’s face it - the (supposedly) top-ranked engineering schools are not top-ranked because of their teaching, but rather for their research. If a junior engineering prof is publishing heavily in top journals, then I doubt that the tenure committee would care however unreasonably he may run his classes. And even if they did care, and therefore denied him tenure, his extensive publication record would ensure that he would be immediately snapped up by another top school. </p>
<p>And let’s face it - the heavy, nearly monolithic - emphasis on research at those top-ranked schools is not going to change anytime soon. </p>
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<p>It may require theory, but the question is, does it require mathematical derivation of an analytical model? </p>
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<p>Passing that exam requires that you score a sufficiently high score on the curve that is set by the other students in the class. But that’s precisely the problem: grading is therefore arbitrary and relative. If the other students learn the mathematical derivations, then you must do the same, or else score poorly on the curve and hence flunk. </p>
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<p>But we’re not talking about only practicing engineers who do fluids-related work. Rather, we’re talking about all engineers. After all, this is a course required of all the students in the major. An engineering student who wants to do non-fluids work has to figure out a way to pass this exam anyway. </p>
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<p>Sure, but so what? That speaks to the goal of the program - is the program training students for academia, or for practice? Even at the top-ranked programs, the majority of students are not going to become future academics.</p>
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<p>On the contrary, while research will always be the primary focus, more and more commonly, top schools are putting a larger focus on educating their students when searching for new faculty. That isn’t to say that a prodigious researcher with mediocre teaching ability will lose out to a good researcher/teacher, but less often than the past do you see people who are completely incompetent in teaching. Of course the cream of the crop schools will likely be some of the last ones to change, but even now you see some of the top 10 caliber schools changing their hiring model to place more emphasis on teaching. It isn’t a perfect system, but it is getting better.</p>
<p>The impetus for this is simply that the teaching reputation of schools is being publicized more and more these days. It is in the schools’ best interests to raise this part of their profile. Except for perhaps the case of MIT, the rest of the schools, especially public schools, need to keep up with their peers in this regard. MIT is likely already so established that they can just keep doing what they want, and I have no idea if they are or aren’t changing their hiring practices.</p>
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<p>At times, yes. As an example, the design of a new airfoil isn’t just a “guess and check” kind of procedure. The designs are created heavily using theoretical models, often very mathematical in nature, and using those to generate designs which can then be iterated on using software and further theory, eventually culminating in wind tunnel models which can be tested empirically. You can find this approach throughout engineering. The guys doing all the initial design need to be very good at theory and mathematics.</p>
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<p>Unless you have access to the syllabus, you have no idea whether that class, that semester was graded on a curve. I, for example, have had more classes graded on a standard scale than on a curve. While I see the point of your argument, it is based on an assumption that we cannot at present verify. Still, curves are not as unfair as everyone seems to claim assuming that the average student in a given class is representative of the average engineering student. In most cases, this is probably a reasonably valid assumption</p>
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<p>Not true. A department doesn’t know what every student will do after they graduate. They don’t tailor individual curricula. By that token, they teach the core subjects to everyone. All you need to do is pass and you can just go work in a different area. As such, you would expect fluids engineers to have done well in fluids but not necessarily in other areas. It isn’t fair to expect someone in industry who hasn’t done fluids in 20 years to remember how to do all this, but it is fair to expect someone working as a fluids engineer for the past 20 years to be able to pass that test. I personally think they could.</p>
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<p>You cited academia earlier so I mentioned it here.</p>
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<p>Most engineering students are not chemical engineering students, so they would have little reason to take the course (or a similar course at another school) and exam in question.</p>
<p>If by Washington you mean WUSTL you might consider systems engineering. Let me know which Washington you mean.</p>
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<p>Not to mention that most engineering students aren’t at Berkeley where this one apparently beastly test exists. The only real class I can remember where we faced time pressure on derivations within my engineering curriculum was my first Thermodynamics course. The exams were structured in way such that, if you had done the homeworks, you’d be able to get a C without much time pressure, needed to be able to understand some underlying stuff to get a B, and had to really grasp the material in order to get an A.</p>
<p>(Waiting on sakky to bring up Maxwell Relations now that I mentioned thermo.)</p>
<p>Come on, I don’t think that a very high percentage of engineering students “flunk” out because of the nature of the tests. Engineering programs may have maybe a large dropout rate because it is an intense major, but I believe that most of those students drop out of their own volition. And the ones who really “flunk” out are probably the class-skippers who don’t turn in assignments.</p>
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<p>Really? Well, last time I checked, Berkeley was indeed a public school, and they don’t really seem to be particularly interested in changing their engineering faculty career track to emphasize teaching in favor of research. Berkeley is just as research-centric as ever. </p>
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<p>And at other times, clearly no. Those particular design engineers of which you speak are perfectly free to take advanced theoretical courses on aerodynamics and fluid mechanics where they can learn to derive equations to their heart’s content. And employers of such engineers are perfectly free to simply not hire engineers who lack this coursework. </p>
<p>The fundamental question is, why is every engineering student required to complete this coursework? Let’s face it - many (almost certainly most) engineering jobs are not particularly theoretical or mathematical in nature. In fact, I can think of numerous practicing engineers who haven’t used any mathematics beyond simple algebra for years, sometimes decades. Many engineering jobs entail little more than using standard rules of thumb and relatively basic technical analyses. </p>
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<p>Oh, trust me, I think this is a very safe assumption, for this was a Berkeley exam that is at question, and if Berkeley were to actually have changed its grade curving policy in its engineering weeder courses, I highly doubt that I would not have heard of it by now, because it would represent nothing less a sea-change in the philosophy of the department. For at least the last few decades, these courses have always been curved, and harshly to boot. As an example, for Berkeley to have abolished the curve would have surely elicited eruptions of discussion on the Berkeley section of college confidential. </p>
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<p>Well, at least in the case of Berkeley, clearly they’re not the ‘average’ engineering student. And the same is true of the other top ranked engineering programs such as MIT or Caltech. These are, ostensibly, the very best engineering programs and hence have supposedly the best engineering students. You are then graded on curves relative to the very best, and where somebody must fail, because the curve dictates that it be so. </p>
<p>So returning the discussion to the original example, the average practicing engineer - even if working in a fluids capacity - would almost certainly fail this exam. It would not be sufficient that he knows the fundamentals of fluids because he can’t do the math, and the competing students who are setting the curve will know the math, and that practicing engineer will surely be relegated to one of the lowest scores on the curve, and hence fail. You don’t get many points for simply demonstrating the knowledge of fundamentals, because the game is determined by how many points you can score via the mathematical derivations. Sad but true. </p>
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<p>And you speak as if passing is simply a trivial task, when the truth is, it is far from that. Passing those weeders means that you have to survive the curve that other students are setting. </p>
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<p>I must diametrically disagree - such an engineer would surely fail miserably, because he can’t complete the math, and the math is what sets the curve. Simply put, there will always be some students who basically are impressive math acrobats, and their presence pile-drives down the grades of everybody else, because they set the curve. Your only choice is to then either match their mathematical prowess, or fail. </p>
<p>Like I said, engineering grading in curved classes is determined not by what you know on an exam, but rather by what you know relative to what everybody else knows. Have 5 Einsteins take the exam, and one of them will fail, because the curve dictates that one must fail. It doesn’t matter if you know a lot, all that matters is that the other students knew more. And in this case, their ‘extra’ knowledge is not even particularly relevant to most engineering jobs, as most such jobs entail little mathematical derivation. But that extra knowledge is highly useful in avoiding being weeded out. </p>
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<p>But I’m not talking about academia anymore. </p>
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<p>Um, so what? Most practicing chemical engineers also are not specialists in fluids. I am quite certain that most of them couldn’t pass the exam laid forth as an example. </p>
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<p>I rather doubt that those Berkeley exams are truly so atypical of what is to be found at many top engineering programs. {Now, granted, you may argue that the top engineering programs are, as whole, themselves atypical, but that’s another discussion for another time.} </p>
<p>But fine, I’ll entertain your example. Honestly, how many practicing engineers - right now - could pass that thermo exam of which you speak. No, not those particular practicing engineers who specialize in thermo, but the entire aggregate of practicing engineers. </p>
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<p>Well, here is where it indeed gets muddled. I agree that many students do indeed drop out, but only because their engineering exam performances convince them do to so. For example, if you fail your first engineering midterm, are you really going to stay in the class? I don’t know about you, but I would drop out right then and there. Even if I understood the fundamentals of the course, I would still drop out, because that failure would indicate that I simply lack the acrobatic mathematical ability to stay alive in that course. Even if I enjoyed engineering and wanted to stay, I would know that those super-acrobats are still going to be there, and they’re still going to be setting the curve. In fact, those guys are going to be there during your entire engineering program. </p>
<p>Hence, every engineering student is basically confronted with two realistic choices - either develop star mathematical acrobatics themselves. Or drop out of the program. It doesn’t matter how much you enjoy engineering, it doesn’t matter how much engineering intuition you have. All that matters is whether you can do the math. Sad but true. After all, when the curve is set, nobody is going to care whether your engineering fundamental knowledge was solid. All they will see is that you couldn’t do the math, and the other students could.</p>
<p>sakky, you are in big time trouble now:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/13967040-post25.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/13967040-post25.html</a></p>
<p>you just brought memories of the single toughest exam that I ever took in College. The Princeton ChE Fluid Dynamics midterm</p>
<p>a total nightmare, with an average score for the class of brilliant future engineers of 8/40 points.</p>
<p>ouch!</p>
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<p>At no point did I say anyone was emphasizing teaching in favor or research. Only that they have put more of an emphasis on teaching than the nearly zero that they did before.</p>
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<p>So you think that since some engineers don’t use all of the material they were taught in their focus area, the programs should remove all the difficult, less practical/more theoretical courses? I’m sorry but that is just plain silly. The job of a university is not to just give people job training. That is a trade school. The purpose of a university is generation of knowledge, and it just so happens that employers tend to value the graduates of said universities. Anyone can be trained to press a series of buttons on a computer and adhere to a few rules of thumb, but if that is all we taught our engineers, we would never move forward. No progress would ever be made.</p>
<p>An engineering education isn’t about teaching the students to take a bunch of rules of thumb and apply them. It is about teaching them how solving a problem and the design of the solution is evolved from physical principles. Just because companies don’t always utilize every skill of every engineer doesn’t mean we should stop teaching it properly.</p>
<p>This argument is where it falls apart. Why do you think that it is is even relevant that not every engineer has to know a topic? Engineers learn a set of skills that they may need later in the subset of jobs that draw from their major. Everyone knows that no one will use everything they learn later, but everything that these programs teach is used by someone that graduates from there, so they can’t well just stop teaching it.</p>
<p>I just don’t get you.</p>
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<p>If you subscribe to this theory, then you must also subscribe to the theory that any other engineering school would be happy to take the transfer of such students where they would surely excel at their studies.</p>
<p>Give me a break. The science is the same everywhere, and if every person in the class got the same high score, they wouldn’t fail anyone. Professors are not generally out to get you and aren’t generally going to just fail people for fun. Either you learn the material or you don’t. Will you get screwed by a curve sometimes? Sure. The bottom line is that no one, not even at Berkeley or MIT, is going to flunk out because they only averaged an 80% on exams and these programs are looking for students who want to master the material, so if people are averaging 60% on exams and failing and complaining that the material or curve is too hard, then I don’t blame Berkeley for flunking them. They don’t belong there.</p>
<p>The “they are out to get me” attitude that some people exhibit is just laughable. Do you honestly think that the curve in classes is so rigid that if the class was composed of Fermi, Einstein, Feynman, Prandtl and Newton that the professor would fail one of them? If so, you are more delusional than any of us thought.</p>
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<p>And yet it is still an assumption, and even if it is true, it is one data point of thousands. Also, a curve can be neither harsh nor light. A curve, by definition, is simply fitting grades to a normal distribution, and as such, it isn’t any harsher at one school than another.</p>
<p>There really isn’t as much math as you think there is on that exam. It is mostly algebra and a bit of calculus. Will you remember the calculus 20 years down the road? Who knows? It depends on your job. Still, you can’t dumb down the test for everyone just because a portion - no matter how large - of the students won’t use it. That isn’t the point of a university education</p>