<p>I was wondering how hard is it to get a 3.0 GPA in a good State University. Is it very difficult or easy?</p>
<p>I was also wondering how much the workload is in a State University for Mechanical Engineering. Am I looking at all-nighters?</p>
<p>it depends on the person. Some people will never study but find ways to do well on exams and get by with 3.0. Some people study really hard but can’t get pass 3.0. It really depends on the person and their skills. But if you try hard enough (the same # of hours you put outside of the classroom as the number of credit/unit you take) you’ll be fine.</p>
<p>I think that, on the average, a person of average intelligence who puts an average amount of work into school will end up with between a 2 and a 3. If you want to get at least a 3, you’ll need to be smarter than the people sitting next to you in class, or you’ll have to try harder, or some combination of the two.</p>
<p>Engineering overall is a pretty easy curriculum, its not to hard to get a 3.0.</p>
<p>even if you don’t do anything, you still end up with gpa between 2 and 3. </p>
<p>well, ok, that’s an exaggeration.but if your gpa gets below 2, you are really not doing anything by definition.</p>
<p>do some average work for heaven’s sake, and it’s easy to get 3.0.</p>
<p>if you try really hard, and you still can’t get above 3.0 in your major, it’s about time you start rethinking about your major.</p>
<p>By ‘work’, are we looking at all-nighters?</p>
<p>"Engineering overall is a pretty easy curriculum, its not to hard to get a 3.0. "
- Ummm… I think that’s a bold claim to make. It may be easy for <em>you</em>, but I don’t think it would be for most people. I’d be willing to wager that a lot (if not a majority) of people never take calculus, for instance.</p>
<p>It’s my opinion that if you really think any curriculum is “easy”, you don’t understand or appreciate it. I don’t want to use that as a basis for the argument I’m making against the idea that engineering is easy, but I thought I’d put it out there.</p>
<p>I disagree with this statement. While it varies from program, most engineering programs have zero grade inflation (sometimes negative inflation!) and therefore it is difficult to maintain a high GPA.</p>
<p>Keep in mind that state universities typically have strong engineering programs and therefore it will take some work to stay afloat. </p>
<p>Honestly, a 3.0 in engineering isn’t a bad GPA at all and probably close to the average. Keep in mind that the average engineer works a lot harder than the average
non-engineering student. So “minimum work” in an engineering program still means spending hours on a lab and problem sets.</p>
<p>I think I remember hearing that the average engineering GPA in the US is somewhere around a 2.8 or 2.9. That said, I think AuburnMathTutor hit the nail on the head in saying that an average person with average work can get in the mid-2 range, and to get 3.0+ you need to be smarter than average, and above average worker, or half and half.</p>
<p>Also, you should never have to pull an all-nighter as long as you exhibit some decent form of time management. The only times I got stuck doing all-nighters is when I decided that watching the Office and 30 Rock, followed by hanging out and/or going out was more important that keeping up with the workload. In other words, all of my all-nighters occurred before junior year when I wised up. =)</p>
<p>What I mean is that for most math minded people, it really is not hard. I was forced to take classes like linguistics and art and some literature. I found those 200x harder than anything I ever did in my engineering classes. Engineering is simply learn, and repeat or plug and chug. In classes like literature, you need need to think the way the professor does to get the grade, you have to look into small bits of text and be able to pull out pages of analysis. That at least to me is alot harder than doing some math.</p>
<p>sure did engineering classes get hard, yeah they did at times. But it was nothing compared too reading 3-4 books a week and having to write papers on them. I would have shot myself if I had to do that.</p>
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<p>I hope you never say that in an interview or you will never get hired. I feel like you missed the whole point of engineering… =/</p>
<p>basic math and physics do plug and chug, engineering is not!</p>
<p>I don’t remember any of my Math/Physics/Engineering classes as being plug-chug. Sure, there were always those standard equations/models to use but the true difficulty was finding out how exactly to reduce a problem to that form. </p>
<p>Hopefully other grad students will agree, but I feel that I learned more in one semester of graduate fluids/thermo/heat transfer than a full year of my UG classes. In UG the correlations were glossed over but after spending a year with the dreaded NS monsters you develop a new found respect for problem solving.</p>
<p>Anyway, some people are wired different. I had a friend who couldn’t write if this life depended on it but could easily tackle quantum. I actually double majored in the liberal arts along with engineering. Sure, the reading was tough but I found paper writing was really easy–the professor/literary criticism/class discussions already gave plenty of ammo for your premise. Finally, I found that most liberal art professors will at the very least give you a B as long as you show up to class. On the other hand I know as a former TA and through my engineering professors that if you don’t understand the fundamental concept, be it NS for fluids or the 1st/2nd laws for thermo, you have no chances of getting above a D.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t say that I learned more in oen semester than a full year of undergrad, because it depends on the level of the class. I have learned comparable amounts so far in my grad classes as I did in my later (400-level and a handful of 300-level) undergrad classes. The biggest difference is the depth you go into. The first tier of grad classes for me have treated the physical basis for the subject with much more attention than any 300-level class ever did in undergrad, where the focus was more on problem solving with a basic knowledge of the physics. The 400-level undergrad classes were somewhere in between, if not completely like the grad classes at UIUC, though. For instance, I took viscous flow as an undergrad and it is very similar to how my classes are being taught now. That said, in undergrad, if you didn’t understand the basic physics and just relied on memorization, you had a VERY hard time with the material. If you did understand it but still tried to just memorize and regurgitate, then you probably did better, but I wouldn’t want you on my team of engineers when it comes time to actually do work. That approach is nearly worthless.</p>
<p>Also an aside: I know you are doing fluids like I am, nshah. Have you had to take a Perturbation class yet? I was just wondering how that class is at other schools, because it is absolutely insane here. I feel like some of the stuff requires black magic to correctly solve.</p>
<p>Look dude, it’s either you manage your time correctly or you pull all nighters at the last moment.</p>
<p>To the OP: it has been my experience that if you go to class and listen, and do the homework that you should at least pass all of your classes. I have found that most of the engineering classes I have taken were easiy to get an C in, reasonable to get an B in, but hard to get an A in. </p>
<p>If you learn to study efficiently and manage your time well, you should never have to pull all nighters. I personally cant learn too much at once, so I usually spread my tasks out over a few days. I dont usually study more than 4 hours a day.</p>
<p>The amount of time you spend studying also depends what grades you have to have to keep scholarships, apply to graduate school etc.</p>