<p>For Dartmouth Engineering students who decide to pursue engineering as a career, is it possible to go from the four year BA program on to an Engineering Grad school (thus skipping the 5th year required for a BE)? Or is the BE degree a necessity to get into good grad schools?</p>
<p>In general, the Dartmouth AB degree (which is not ABET-accredited) would likely be a handicap in terms of admission to engineering graduate schools. The extent of the handicap would vary, depending on the school and other aspects of your undergraduate record (such as research). </p>
<p>Some grad schools might strictly require ABET-accreditated undergraduate degrees (the Dartmouth BE is accredited, but the AB is not). Other grad schools might be willing to accept a candidate with an unaccredited AB, but might also require makeup of some undergraduate coursework. </p>
<p>For example, look at [url=<a href="http://engineering.dartmouth.edu/graduate/ms/index.html]Dartmouth’s[/url">http://engineering.dartmouth.edu/graduate/ms/index.html]Dartmouth’s[/url</a>] MS program. Dartmouth will enroll students into the MS programs with or without accredited engineering bachelor’s degrees. But students without accredited degrees have to complete more 50% more coursework than those with accredited degrees. </p>
<p>A Dartmouth engineering AB would probably not be a handicap at all if you were applying to law or MBA programs. In fact, it would probably be very attractive to such programs.</p>
<p>Yeah, I really like that about Dartmouth engineering–I would be well prepared for a lot of things; the only thing I’m somewhat worried about is if I decide I actually want to be an engineer. In that case I guess I could always try to squeeze the BS into 4 years because I should have some AP Credit; I really don’t want to have to pay for a fifth year.</p>