<p>Like I said, I’m afraid that I’m still have no evidence that Berkeley engineering has begun to emphasize teaching. If you have evidence of that, I’d be glad to look at it. </p>
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<p>I just don’t get you. </p>
<p>The issue is not whether you should not teach advanced topics such as mathematical gymnastics. The issue is why you should flunk out students who can’t or won’t develop those skills, particularly when those skills are used by - at best - only a minority of practicing engineers in the world. </p>
<p>And that is where your argument falls apart. After all, if the governing philosophy is that one person somewhere in the world might be using a particular skill in their job, then that would imply that every skill should be a requirement. For clearly we can agree that forcing all engineering students to learn to speak Chinese - on pain of failure if they cannot - would be ridiculous. But why? After all, there are surely plenty of engineers in the world who actually have to converse in Chinese as part of their job. I know an engineer who actually has to personally know how to race cars as part of his job, as he works for a high-performance division of a car company that competes in NASCAR. So does that mean that every engineering student must learn how to race cars, or else fail if they cannot? </p>
<p>To be clear, I can agree that if an engineering student truly does not understand the actual * fundamentals* of engineering, fine, flunk him out. But if his only problem is that he cannot complete the advanced mathematical derivations, then I must question why you’re flunking him out. </p>
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<p>And sadly that is also not the case - as no other school wants to take a transfer student who left his previous school in poor academic standing (read: flunked out). </p>
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<p>Give me a break. Granted, they obviously wouldn’t all get exactly the same score. There would always be some stochastic variance, due to the time pressure of the exam. So maybe one student didn’t quite as far in solving the mathematical derivations as the other students did. That student fails. </p>
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<p>Oh really. interesting that you would say that, for let me tell you of one particular example. I distinctly remember one exam where one guy did indeed score somewhere in the 80%'s - and was entirely distraught. Why? Because the mean was a 95%, and the tightness of the curve was that he basically got no better than a D, and probably an F. It doesn’t matter what your absolute score is, it only matters what your score is relative to everybody else’s score. </p>
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<p>Actually, you’re darn right that they would, and if you don’t believe it, then, frankly, you’re more delusional than any of us thought. The curves are sadly sacrosanct. They won’t care whether the class is populated entirely with geniuses. They’re going to curve the class anyway, and hence somebody must fail. </p>
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<p>Actually, wrong, because while the curve can be fitted to a ‘normal’ distribution (or any other probability distribution that you wish), the mean of the curve can be shifted to wherever you want. A normal distribution is not necessarily a normal standardized distribution that is standardized around any one fixed letter grade. If a prof wants to standardize around the letter grade of A- (such that the average student gets an A-) they are free to do that. If the class wants standardize around the letter grade of a C, they are free to do that as well…and they have. </p>
<p>What that means is that the letter grading is once again arbitrary. Let’s again say that you scored in the 25th percentile of your class. Under a ‘lenient’ curve, that may translate to a B grade (and where the average person receives an A-). But under a ‘harsh’ curve, that may translate to a D or F, which are failing grades. But the school registrar won’t care why you failed. If you failed because you took classes with harsh curves, they don’t care why. All that the registar will see is that you did not meet the minimum GPA necessary to stay in good academic standing. </p>
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<p>Fine, then by the same token, why not have the entire exam written in Chinese? That seems to be just as arbitrary of a skill to use to differentiate grades.</p>
<p>As an example, there is nothing in that exam you posted that I would consider an advanced mathematical derivation. It was actually almost completely understanding basic principles coupled with a test on manipulating the Navier-Stokes equations for two superposed fluids flowing down an incline. It really isn’t that hard. In fact, the hardest part of that exam is probably the third question that requires you to just remember a handful of facts rather than use knowledge of first principles to get an answer. The majority of engineering exams I have ever taken or seen at the undergraduate level require no more math than basic calculus and ODEs. If you think that is too much math, then I think you are fighting a losing battle.</p>
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<p>This is cynicism at its best. If a class of 20 took an exam and there were 19 people with a 90 score and 1 person with an 89 score, I can basically guarantee you that the professor is not going to fail the 89 unless he is a particularly evil human being. You are overgeneralizing That this sort of distribution obviously rarely happens, and usually it is just the bottom of the barrel students who get stuck on the tail end of the distribution (assuming that the class is using a curve in the first place, which many don’t). If professors really were flunking that one student who is one percentage point below the others but still with a high grade, then I would agree with you. I have never seen that happen nor do I know anyone who has, so unless you show me some evidence that things like that ever happen, I think everyone can safely assume that what we have all experienced - the poor-performing students are the ones getting stuck on the back end of the curve - is what is happening in general, not your extreme curving situation.</p>
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<p>I have had that happen to, getting ~85 on an exam but being below the average in a tight distribution. I still got a B in the class. This was at UIUC, which is no slouch of a school, likely even by your standards. Do you know what this person’s final grade was who you cite, or do you just assume based on the fact that he was distraught? I can think of plenty of similar anecdotal evidence where the same thing happened to friends and they did fine just like I did.</p>
<p>It does matter what your absolute score is. Professors typically use a curve or a scale of some sort, but ultimately they reserve the right to dole out grades how they see fit, and they rarely see it as advantageous to blatantly screw over someone who is clearly qualified. It looks bad for the school when you have high attrition rates. I am acquainted with department heads in several engineering departments who all the time talk about ways to help struggling students pass. This would, of course, be counter-productive if the practice was to fail a few good ones who did well in a class full of other people who do well.</p>
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<p>This has not been my experience at all, and frankly, you are literally the only person who I have come across who claims this to be the case. Not a single other person I know or have met has claimed to have had this experience. Yes, this includes MIT grads, Berkeley grads, Purdue grads, Michigan grads, Princeton grads, Stanford grads, Illinois grads and a whole host of other schools’ graduates. Frankly, your one data point that contradicts everything that I, everyone I know and everyone else I have met have experienced just isn’t too convincing.</p>
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<p>This is again assuming that professors are inherently evil, which is not, in general, the case. There are a couple of bad eggs out there, but by and large, professors do want to see their students succeed. You can be as cynical as you want, but the reality is that professors generally have no reason to want to flunk a bunch of otherwise worthy people. That they desire that defies all logic. The most common way that the classes graded on curves are graded is that they get the final grades for the semester and then look at how the whole class performed and adjust the curve accordingly so that they get the distribution they are looking for. More often than not, they let the average fall in the B-/C+ kind of range in my experience. I’ve never seen a professor blatantly and intentionally screw over students who should be passing if not for the curve… ever.</p>
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<p>Don’t be ridiculous. Now you deem calculus and other math skills to be as unrelated to an engineering education as knowing Chinese? That is one of the most preposterous things I have heard in a long time.</p>
<p>Did you, while in school, get really screwed over by a curve at some point or something? I honestly can’t figure out any other reason for this level of irrational hatred towards the establishment. Engineering education could stand for some improving, and I do agree that curves, on the whole, are not the fairest way to go about things, but you seem to be on a crusade against them based on some kind of past experience. Honestly, sakky, what makes you tick? I am sure there are a great many people on this site that would love to know a little more about you. You have strong opinions, some I agree with and some I don’t, but I think pretty much is as completely lost as me in figuring out what exactly drives these opinions.</p>
<p>Hey Sakky, I’m in this class (150A) and thermo (141) right now, and I have to disagree with you on some of these points.</p>
<p>First of all, very few people in my classes ever complain about the curve. I think the curves are actually quite fair. Those that know the material very well get an A or A+, those that know the material decently well but not perfectly get some kind of B, those that know some of the material but have big gaps in understanding get some kind of C, and those that know embarrassingly little of the material get a D or an F. And most students understand this. When people I know do below average, they don’t blame the professor, the exam, or the class; they blame their own understanding and effort. They clearly didn’t study the lecture notes well enough, or didn’t go ask friends, TA’s, or the professor for enough help in the week prior to the midterm. Some people recover from this and do better next time, but others can’t handle it and switch to another major. That’s just how it goes. </p>
<p>Second, I very much disagree with you that there are these “super-acrobats” at Berkeley that set the curve. At least in Chemical Engineering, maybe there are some crazy EECS or physics/math majors. For example, on the thermo exam a couple of weeks ago, the average was a 57/115 (roughly 50%) with a standard deviation of 13 ish. I was able to score a 96 on the exam, and my friend scored a 91, but we are NOT geniuses by any stretch of the imagination. We paid attention in lecture, did all of the homeworks, and studied reasonably hard for the exam, just like everyone else. I just think the people who scored below average just didn’t put enough effort into the course. All of the concepts were covered extensively in lecture, and there were plenty of opportunities to ask for help. I honestly believe that someone who got a D or F on that exam hardly deserves to be a chemical engineer. </p>
<p>And third, the 150A exam you posted really isn’t that unreasonable, when you consider that problems just like these are solved regularly in lecture and assigned in huge numbers on the homeworks. And most people enjoy solving these types of problems. My professor would definitely classify these as being part of the ‘fundamentals of engineering’ as opposed to ‘advanced mathematical derivations’. There’s no excuse for not knowing how to do them by the time the exam rolls around.</p>
<p>I think this is a poor metric of the quality of an exam, actually. How many physics majors frequently need to determine the dimensionalities at which an Ising lattice has a phase transformation? How many accountants take classes in which they don’t specialize? How may lawyers need to take classes in forms of law which they’ll never practice?</p>
<p>Part of any degree is to give you some breadth of education so you can try and learn what material you find interesting as well as prepare you for a large number of different courses. All of my friends had to take a few classes on metals, yet that probably hasn’t done a whole lot of good to those that wound up in the polymer industry.</p>
<p>Also, having “breadth within the major” can be useful to one who specializes in a different area within the major, because there may be times when working in the specialty needs understanding of other areas of the subject, in which case, having the breadth exposure can help at least in knowing what other specialty can apply to solve a particular problem, and therefore what questions to ask, whom to consult, etc…</p>
<p>To paraphrase Cardinal Newman on his writing on the function of a university: utilitarianism is a threat to utility. By only doing teaching the “practical” *i.e. only develop tools with existing technology that are needed for today’s problems, future generations are deprived of the new tools and understanding needed to solve the practical problems of tomorrow.</p>
<p>And I will continue to ask the question: who do you think is more likely to win tenure at MIT or Berkeley - the junior engineering prof with an excellent teaching record but mediocre research record, or the one with an excellent research record but mediocre teaching record? Be honest with yourself. I think in your heart, you know what the truth is. </p>
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<p>Actually, whether you (or even I) think the exam to be an example of advanced mathematical derivations is beyond the point. The relevant question is whether practicing engineers in industry could pass this exam right now. No, not engineers in academia, or engineering students still in school, but rather practicing engineers in industry.</p>
<p>I can tell you that in the last few days, I’ve presented this very exam to more than 10 practicing industry engineers, all of whom graduated from top engineering programs, and the majority of which hold graduate engineering degrees. And, to a man, every one of them has responded by laughing and saying that they wouldn’t have a prayer. Granted, they probably could have passed this exam when they were students. But the fact remains that they haven’t touched that stuff in years, sometimes decades. In fact, to a man, every one of them stated that it would likely take them weeks, perhaps months, for them to relearn all of the math necessary to even begin to try to pass this exam. Heck, a few of them even jokingly remarked that they would be ecstatic just to score a D grade on this exam. </p>
<p>So perhaps they should all be fired and their engineering degrees stripped from them because of their inability to pass this exam? Yet every one of them today holds an advanced engineering position, and some of them have recently won awards from their employers for their engineering work. Maybe somebody needs to call those employers and inform them that they’re employing a bunch of incompetent engineers. </p>
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<p>No, I’m afraid that this is not ‘cynicism at best’, but rather is reality. Your new scenario is likewise unlikely because, like you said, the stochastic nature of test-taking means that obviously not everybody but one person is going to achieve the same score and that other person receives a point less. As you said yourself, a scores will be distributed according to a spread.</p>
<p>But that spread is precisely the issue. Sure, the “poorly performing” students (as you defined them) will indeed fail. But what defines “poorly performing”? It is indeed the ability to do the math. If you can’t do the math as well as the other students, then you will be tagged as one of the poorly performing students destined to fail. And, like I said above, if you happen to be an award-winning industry engineer with decades of experience who can no longer do the math, you will nevertheless be tagged as one of those “poor performers”. </p>
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<p>Fine, then let’s invoke another data point, albeit from EECS. The GPA guidelines specifically state that typical lower-division EECS courses should be curved around a 2.7, and upper-division courses to be a 2.9. It is furthermore recommended that ~13% of lower-division course grades be failing (D or F). </p>
<p>Now, granted, there may be some wiggle room within that letter distribution, but it seems highly unlikely that there would be enough room to allow everybody to pass. Hence, it is therefore still true that if the class happens to be populated with geniuses, some of them will nevertheless fail because the curve dictates it to be so. </p>
<p>Now, to be clear, I am not contending that any individual professors are behaving evilly. Indeed, I agree with you that many of them may indeed be highly compassionate individuals who care for the welfare of their students. But that doesn’t matter, for they nevertheless have to respect departmental guidelines, and the department is incentivized to maintain its ‘prestige’. </p>
<p>On the other hand, you once again did say something telling to which I agree - professors generally only flunk those students who they deem are ‘unworthy’. But who would that be, exactly? I suppose that would include all of those practicing, award-winning industry engineers who nevertheless cannot pass those exams. </p>
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<p>Is it? So then why is it that so many award-winning practicing engineers cannot compute that calculus, if it is indeed so pertinent to the job? That calculus might as well be Chinese to them. </p>
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<p>He dropped out of engineering, because he feared failing if he stayed. So we’ll never know what his final grade would have been.</p>
<p>Hence, at the end of the day, somebody who actually demonstrated quite strong knowledge of a particular engineering exam nevertheless felt the need to leave engineering. Sad story - for he was a nice guy, passionate about technology, intellectually curious. I suspect that he could have been a quite serviceable practicing engineer. Unfortunately we’ll never know. </p>
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<p>Look, the title of this thread is regarding the practicality of engineering education, with the implicit assumption that many engineering programs are indeed rather impractical. Indeed, boneh3ad, you yourself seem to agree that this is so, for you recommended that the OP should perhaps consider Engineering Technology programs rather than engineering programs. </p>
<p>If I therefore have any animating driving force, it springs from the question: why must this dichotomy exist? Why is it wrong for a student to work hard to enjoy the advantages that a top school entails - the branding, recruiting access, networking, resources - while also still learning highly topical practical skills that can be immediately applied to construct topical, working technologies? Why must these students choose between theory and practicality? {Granted, there are indeed students at the top-ranked schools who do learn practical skills, but they generally do so in their spare time as an additional burden to their regular studies.} </p>
<p>But fine, boneh3ad, I’ll play your game. I’ll give you a bit of insight into me. One summer as an engineering intern at a major firm which shall remain unnamed, I was shocked and appalled to discover that I was the only person in the entire plant who actually knew how to calculate anything beyond simple algebra. This was a plant fully staffed by numerous engineers from prestigious schools, some of them even with PhD’s. And surely they did at one time while as students did understand how to perform calculus-derived engineering derivations. But the fact is, they hadn’t done so in years. Indeed, many of those engineers remarked that, candidly, you don’t really need to know that stuff to work as an engineer. Yet I knew fully well that in a few months, once the internship concluded, I was going to be plunged right back into a world of endless derivations. Why? </p>
<p>I also remember chalking it up to possibly having an outlier experience, only to return to find that the experience of other students on their internships was consistent. With the minor exception of those who took internships at academic institutions (and even this was not a universal exception), practically everybody turned out to have far stronger mathematical and derivational skills than the experienced engineers they worked with. Heck, one guy even ended providing calculus homework tutorials for the daughter of his boss, because his boss - despite being a senior engineer - could not remember how to calculate even a simple integral. Which only reinforced the question I had: why are engineering students forced to master analytical techniques that practicing engineers do not use? </p>
<p>As a second story - preluded above by the story of the guy above who scored a ‘failing 85%’ and hence dropped out of engineering - I’ve known plenty of innovative people, in some cases veritable technology geniuses, who nevertheless could not succeed in theoretical engineering courses. For example, I remember one guy who, in his freshman year, was already writing and designing highly sophisticated video games and devices. Before the days of Tivo, he had already built himself a rudimentary DVR that allowed him to tune into TV signals, download a program guide, configure shows to record, and allowed him to skip commercials. {Granted, it was nowhere near as slick as Tivo, but it did work, and this during the days before Tivo}. </p>
<p>The problem is that he had problems comprehending theoretical CS. Specifically, he couldn’t wrap his head around discrete mathematics and specifically with such concepts as number theory, combinatorics, or graph theory. Unfortunately, you need to know that material well if you want to pass the courses necessary to complete a CS major at many schools. He therefore had to drop out of CS. </p>
<p>Granted, happily, his story did have a happy ending because the software job market is open to people without CS degrees (or without any degrees at all). While some employers wouldn’t interview him because he lacked a CS degree, he did obtain other offers that actually paid higher than what many CS graduates were being offered. {He ended up turning them all down to start his own software firm.} Unfortunately such outlets don’t really exist in other engineering disciplines. How many people who could have become perfectly serviceable chemical engineers are lost simply because they can’t wrap their heads around Navier-Stokes or Maxwell Relations? Heck, most practicing engineers are unable to calculate NS or MR but that doesn’t seem to hinder them. </p>
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<p>Well, singh, let me put it to you this way. Each and every one of you would be considered mathematical super-acrobatic super-geniuses to the overwhelming majority of practicing industry engineers out there who can’t even remember how to perform basic calculus any more. </p>
<p>And that again gets back to the core issue of this thread. I always thought - and certainly plenty of outsiders think - that an engineering education was supposed to prepare students how to actually work as an engineer. That is to say, to provide them with the knowledge they actually need to know to do the job. And one would therefore expect that a ‘higher-ranked’ engineering education would actually provide better preparation about how to do the job. If that’s not true, then pray tell, what exactly is the purpose of an engineering education. And what then is the purpose of a ‘higher-ranked’ education? </p>
<p>And like I’ve said, the reality is that what you are obligated to learn in class, as I painfully remember, bears practically no resemblance to what you do on the actual job. You will not be sitting around deriving pages after pages of calculus-based equations all day long. You will certainly not be given 3 such questions to complete in 80 minutes, on pain of being ‘fired’ if you are unable to score enough points.</p>
<p>You like to bring this up, but it dates from the 1970s and was last updated in the 1980s (still referring to some no longer existing courses), and was not being followed in [1999[/url</a>].</p>
<p>Keep in mind that Sakky is this website’s great contrarian, and he’ll never, ever, back down from his position. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and it’s helpful to have someone disagree when all others have the same views, but it’s worthwhile to know before we generate dozens of pages of back-and-forth.</p>
<p>OP, if you want to do anything in electrical engineering, you’re going to have to learn calculus and differential equations. You’re going to have to be very, very intimately acquainted with these areas, since they form the basis for the entire field. </p>
<p>This doesn’t mean you need to learn anything too abstract or remote, since both calculus and differential equations are typically taught in a non-abstract, non-rigorous setting in most engineering programs. Still, you’ll have to take the courses and master the material. Your only other alternative is to be an engineering tech, which is an entirely different vocation.</p>
<p>And you love bringing this data up, for which I have always asked the question: what happens to all of the students who drop their EECS classes mid-semester (and potentially even leave the major)? Let’s face it, the vast majority of those who drop are performing poorly. After all, if you’re getting an A, you’re almost surely not going to drop. If they had stayed in the class, they perhaps would have received a final failing grade. </p>
<p>Hence, any true, uncensored grade distribution should either display a conspicuous hump of dropped students, or otherwise provide a correction factor for the account for those students. Otherwise, any ‘published’ grade distribution can therefore only be interpreted as a description of those students who took the course to completion, which is clearly a strongly rightward-shifted distribution relative to all of the students who actually took the class.</p>
<p>Actually, on the contrary, I’ve often times changed my position when presented with counterarguments that I find convincing. I’d like to think that I’m a reasonable guy (if I don’t say so myself). </p>
<p>As perhaps a famous case in point, I used to think that the financial services industry was providing a clear value-add to society. And I’m sure that you can find previous posts of mine saying exactly that. However, the momentous events of the last few years have convinced me to rethink that position.</p>
<p>Look, nobody is arguing that theory is never useful. Certainly I can agree that some people will need to know how to develop the tools of the future, and such knowledge may indeed entail deep knowledge of fundamental principles. </p>
<p>But, let’s face it, not everybody is going to be doing that. Let’s face it - there really aren’t that many advanced R&D jobs available. I wish there were more, but there are not. Most engineering jobs - especially those outside of academia - are not particularly theoretically intense. </p>
<p>As a case in point, without a doubt, the single biggest source of new demand for chemical engineering jobs for the foreseeable future, will come from the remarkable increases in cheap natural gas that have been unlocked from heretofore uneconomical shale layers. Chemical engineers will be needed not only to ‘frack’ that gas loose through the application of surfactants and emulsifiers, but also to liquefy that gas to export to overseas markets and to leverage that gas as cheap feedstocks for petrochemical processing. Only a small proportion of those jobs will be in R&D such as the development of new surfactant or processing technology; the overwhelming majority of those jobs will consist of the application of existing technologies. Yet these are going to be high-paying jobs in a burgeoning industry.</p>
<p>The overarching question to me is therefore are engineering programs, or at least the top-ranked ones, properly preparing their students for engineering jobs that are actually going to exist in the near future? Not the jobs that those programs might wish would exist, but ones that will actually exist? </p>
<p>Put another way, if a giant boom in R&D and academic engineering jobs was expected to befall the US, then I would agree with boneh3ad that engineering students should indeed learn as much as theory as they possibly can. But does anybody actually foresee that? I know I don’t. What I do see is a boom of relatively basic engineering jobs that require relatively little mathematical or ‘derivational’ capabilities. </p>
<p>What that then means is that not only are engineering programs compelling their students to prepare jobs that don’t actually exist, but more egregiously, are flunking out students who can’t meet that level of preparation. Why? A guy who can’t calculate Navier-Stokes or Maxwell Relations might nevertheless do just fine on a regular Bakken frack job. But we’ll never know - he’s never given the chance because he never gets an engineering degree.</p>
<p>And that’s what the “intended field of study” (as opposed to “most recent field of study”) in year 1 measures – freshmen entering in engineering (or whatever major), whether or not they stay there.</p>
<p>Also, “Berkeley Engineering consistently graduates well over 80% of its entering freshmen”, according to [url=<a href=“http://issuu.com/shawnm/docs/forefront_fall_2011/4]the”>Forefront Fall 2011 by UC Berkeley - Issuu]the</a> column on the right side (“The Engineer’s Advantage”)<a href=“it%20is%20contrasting%20to%20the%20national%20average%20of%2040%%20leaving%20after%20one%20year”>/url</a>. That appears to be inconsistent with your claims about legions of Berkeley Engineering students flunking out of or or leaving engineering. (80% is quite high, since a lot more than 20% of students overall change their majors, even accounting for intra-engineering major changes; the overall graduation rate at Berkeley is about 90%.)</p>
<p>Of course, your experience with Berkeley Chemical Engineering in the College of Chemistry may be different.</p>
<p>Actually, it’s hardly “inconsistent” in the least, for I’m not simply talking about those particular students who were admitted to the Berkeley CoE. What I’d like to know is exactly what happens to all of those Berkeley students who were not admitted* to engineering starting as freshman, but wish they were, and so were attempting to transfer in. </p>
<p>Certainly in my experience, that seemed to be plenty of students. Like I asked in the other thread, let’s attempt to ascertain how many students actually completed some of the initial graded work, such as homework or lab assignments, in a weeder class such as EE40, vs. how many of those students remained in the class for final grades. I believe it is safe to say that those students who completed some of the graded work are no longer simply “shopping for classes” but actually intend to complete the class. Yet how many of those students are nonetheless lost along the way, surely because of poor grades? I would say anywhere from 1/4 to 1/3. The final student population of those classes does tend to be noticeably smaller than the initial population. </p>
<p>Admitted Berkeley CoE students tend to be the most qualified students at Berkeley, so one would think that they would be the most likely to survive the rigors of the program. But then you have those students from the other colleges who want to become engineering students - or in many cases, try out the L&S computer science program for its similarities to the EECS program - and then perform poorly and hence leave. What about them? Seems to me that they should still count as students who tried engineering and left.</p>
<p>Avoid Brown—they are not an engineering school-they are only just now trying to form a chemical engineering dept. And, as a working engineer for 25 years I can truly say that I have never met 1 “engineer” that went to Brown—they’ll just steal your money. Try a good state school…</p>
<p>At many of the top engineering schools, a lot of theory is taught (mostly due to the fact that what’s important in getting a teaching position is a PhD). </p>
<p>In many lower ranked schools, the emphasis is more on practicality. The professors that teach there have more industry experience as opposed to research. This is probably due to the fact that the students that they are graduating are probably not likely to go to grad school as opposed to getting a job after graduation.</p>
<p>Regarding theory vs. practicality, I think there needs to be a healthy combination of both. My favorite class was Geomatics (Surveying/GPS/GIS) where I was taught by a 60 year old grad student who had worked in the private sector for 40 years and returned for his PhD. I’m pretty sure that my fluid mechanics professor has never done anything outside of his lab. It would help a lot if he could possibly give some examples where he could demonstrate how what we are learning in theory could be applicable in the real world.</p>
<p>To the OP: if it helps, I hated math my first attempt at college. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-late twenties, after working paycheck to paycheck for years because I never finished college, that I’d developed an interest in physics and–knowing that I needed to know more math if I was to ever learn more than the pop. sci. version of quantum physics and relativity–I developed an interest in math. It was no longer a chore, but a pleasure. What I’m saying is that my appreciation for and love of math had to grow, and the first thing I had to do was get out of the mindset that math was some painful chore between me and what I wanted to do, rather it was vital.</p>
<p>So, it may be that you will just have to do what I did–grow up. I’m not picking on you, because I went through it myself.</p>