How much more difficult are the top 30 engineering programs..

College Majors Engineering Majors
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I'm not sure about your definition of "difficulty," I guess.

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For a student of a certain ability, the amount of time required to hit a certain GPA.</p>

<p>For a student with (700M/700V) and a 3.9 UW HS GPA, how much time per week will it take to get a 3.5 GPA?</p>

<p>Lets take a school like Berkeley, if you are EECS at Berkeley (which likely has comparable students to Ivy Engineering programs, but lower than MIT/Stanford/Mudd) it is much harder to get a 3.5 from a time standpoint. Of course, this is purely anecdotal.</p>

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<p>I think that's more an indicator of grade deflation/inflation than difficulty, but using your definition of difficulty, I see where you're coming from and agree with you*.</p>

<p>*except for at Mudd... my brother's a senior at Mudd... it's virtually impossible to get anything above a 3.5 and so Mudd's more or less famous for rarely getting people into med school.</p>

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University of Michigan (and I'm sure many other schools do this too) does an internal review of the greatest determinants of how students do in engineering, in other words, they wanted to know what makes a student graduate with a good gpa versus 'not graduating'. The conclusion is that the best indicator is how they do in the Intro Science and Math classes. SAT scores/class rank/high school gpa were almost irrelevant.

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AP courses has always been the best predictor of college success. Why colleges don't weight AP courses above all else is beyond me. Some politically correct BS nonsense, probably.</p>

<p>However, with SAT & GPA I think there is a significant <em>range</em> issue at play. Colleges select students within a fairly narrow band of SAT & GPA, statistical analysis of their GPA data can cause people to think that SAT & GPA do not correlate to college performance. They, of course, do. </p>

<p>That's like saying that height doesn't correlate to basketball performance (which is relatively true if you only look at NBA players). The importance of it just becomes less when the average height is 6'6".</p>

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<p>aibarr,</p>

<p>the question is whether a 700/700, 3.9 student will get a higher GPA at Mudd or Berkeley. I suspect it's harder at Mudd, but not due to it being private - due to it having nearly one of the highest SAT averages of any college.</p>

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AP courses has always been the best predictor of college success. Why colleges don't weight AP courses above all else is beyond me. Some politically correct BS nonsense, probably.

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<p>Probably because there's still a lot of schools out there that don't offer that many AP courses.</p>

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Probably because there's still a lot of schools out there that don't offer that many AP courses.

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Yes, that is the reason they state. Whether it's an adequate reason, I don't know.</p>

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<p>the curve will be highter at the top schools cause it was so hard to get into the program in the first place and everyone there is an over-achiever. yes... everyone. this means that it will be harder to get A's and B's.</p>

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<p>I definitely agree with proton, but at the same time I also agree with Mr. Payne in regard to student caliber at private schools, but the simultaneous reluctance of professors to fail students that do not perform well. I attend a (kind-of) top private school and student performance in rigorous science classes is kind of daunting, where the class average will usually lie around + 80%. So basically if you want to earn an A for that course, you will have to perfom incredibly well on exams, usually taking several weeks in advance to really prepare. However, if you do not do well in the course, you will most likely always receive a C- or better for the course because our school has a serious alumnis foundation. Professors know that there are several alumnis' kids sitting out there in lecture and more often than not they will be very reluctant to fail a student. </p>

<p>I feel like this might be a pretty common thing among top private schools.
My girlfriend attends Carnegie Mellon for engineering and while the coursework is indeed very challenging and strenuous, she always remarks that it is "very easy to get a B, incredibly difficult to earn an A."</p>

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<p>For engineering it is the Quantative/Math GRE/SAT that is most important. It is also not really true to say that quantitative scores correlate to verbal as well. Awhile back, one of my Asian friend got something like 790 math and 510 verbal, but evidently got accepted to MIT, UCB--basically every school you can think of. Although, he just couldn't afford to go to those schools financially. </p>

<p>Also, most engineering grad school has similar data. For example, Purdue has 770M/575V, TA&M 770M/530V. I think Fazlur Khan(UIUC, Sears Tower) would be lucky to score even 300 on his verbal. </p>

<p>So, if someone has 700+ he is well set for engineering even if his verbal is like in 500s.</p>

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There were some sharp cookies at Illinois, but really, every kid at Rice could've been top of the class at Illinois... It was a little alarming to me. It'd take most of the Illinois kids a lot longer to get the implications of things, while most of the Rice kids immediately picked up on things like how our knowledge interfaced to reality.</p>

<p>I think that's why it scares me that so many people take rankings so seriously. Everyone says that Illinois is far and away the best, particularly in civil engineering... so when I went in for my masters, I was expecting something far better than what I'd gotten at Rice, which is hardly even ranked for civil engineering. I expected to be blown out of the water, and I was kind of looking forward to the challenge. What I ran up against were masters students who still calculated out beam capacity to eight decimal places, and who would get irrational answers and put them down as their final answer without a second thought, and that scared me. And yeah, they're young, they're learning... but in industry, nobody checks your work for you, particularly if you have the name recognition of a top program to back you up. Only the glaring errors get spotted by your superiors.</p>

<p>I don't know. They're fairly sharp kids, but... even with the very brightest, I don't think the program did them any favors by letting the process weed out the less talented ones. This past week was my company's intensive crash-course for new graduate engineers. Even though I had a year of experience, I'd asked to attend because I figured it'd be helpful. There was one other Illinois grad there, who'd done both his undergrad and his masters there, and he was completely lost the entire time. I don't know why it still surprises me, but it does. It shocks me, and it scares me. What do these rankings value? Is this the best engineering education that we have to offer? How can we produce engineers that don't recognize that they're calculating out a beam capacity to the nearest half-Big-Mac, then look out in the field and see the construction industry cutting-to-fit and beating-into-place-with-a-sledgehammer, and who don't realize that there's a <em>huge</em> disconnect between the two... and call them the best engineers that academia can produce?

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<p>Actually, I think you touched upon the real issue right there. Illinois may indeed be the very best Civil Engineering school in the country...as far as academia is concerned. However, like you said, there is a big difference between academia and reality. But, whether we like it or not, the academic world doesn't really care about that. The academic world is often times more concerned about producing graduates who will do well in the world of academia, and whether those graduates will do well in industry is just not very important to them. In other words, the audience of the 'top' academic departments consists of other academic departments. </p>

<p>What that means is that professors and grad students at the top departments are tempted to treat the process as little more than a game. Consider the situation from the grad student's point of view: just go to a top department, get your PhD there, try to place in a tenure-track position at another top department, and then win tenure. Whether you actually produced anything or learned anything in your entire career that is<br>
actually useful in the real world - who really cares? All that matters to you is that you got tenure at a top department and hence have a job for life. Compounding the problem is that the journal peer review and conference proceedings process does not really reward real-world relevance, as evidenced by the fact that the vast majority of papers are never read by practicing engineers (and heck, many practitioners don't even know the names of any of the journals and don't care because those journals don't really help them do their jobs). Furthermore, many engineering profs at the top schools have never actually worked as actual full-time practicing engineers for a single day of their lives. </p>

<p>The upshot is that much of the academic community is a hermetically sealed echo chamber that is basically speaking only to itself and cares for only its own norms with little regard for what industry wants. That guy you mentioned who calculated figures to 8 decimal places may have been completely off-base in industry, but would have probably fit in very well in academia.</p>

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Furthermore, many engineering profs at the top schools have never actually worked as actual full-time practicing engineers for a single day of their lives.

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<p>Yeah... it may be like that in other engineering industries, and I see your point about the "in academia" part, and that's a good point. Still, though, the thing about structural engineering is that I was surprised at how really <em>not</em> hermetically sealed it is. It's kind of unnerving, these days, to flip through the design codes that I use in practice every single day and to discover that I know half the guys who wrote it, and went to classes that were <em>taught</em> by these guys. At the upper eschelons of structural engineering, the flow of information between academia and practice is very, very open, and academics' research influences our daily practices in some fairly significant ways. One of my concrete profs at Illinois basically pioneered the strut-and-tie method, which is a way of looking at the force flow in deep concrete beams and designing them like a truss. It's been adopted into code, and we use it frequently in practice to design things like stadium bowl seating supports.</p>

<p>So yeah, I definitely agree with you, that a lot of these folks are going to do just fine in academia... but they affect what I do in some big ways, and if they're gonna be doing that... I'm just a little concerned that Illinois, as one example of what I'm sure are numerous examples, is so cavalier about letting their students be that insulated from the real world for so much of their studies. Why are they letting them learn unrealistic ways of doing things, if they're going to be interfacing so heavily with reality later on? Are they really doing a good job of educating engineers (or even engineering academics) if they're going to make them reboot their entire way of thinking once they start to have to get grants from the AISC, the ACI, and the FHWA, who are only interested in how things work in the real world?</p>

<p>I dunno, dude. I'm not too keen on it happening in my backyard.</p>

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<p>are these schools electrical engineering programs very well respected in the industry: southern illinois-carbondale,uic,northern illinois?</p>

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My girlfriend attends Carnegie Mellon for engineering and while the coursework is indeed very challenging and strenuous, she always remarks that it is "very easy to get a B, incredibly difficult to earn an A."

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<p>I'll attest to this completely. Getting a B in a class involved pretty much just doing the homework and remembering enough about them on a test to put something down for every answer. Getting an A involved knowing every last detail about the homework, material that was covered in class, and usually a decent amount of material done outside of class. Getting a C required a bit of effort, blowing off large numbers of assignments, or tanking every test during the semester (most professors had some sort of forgiveness policy where if you do well on 3/4 of the tests they drop the low one, your final can only bring you up, etc.).</p>

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<p>racinreaver: Did you also attend Carnegie Mellon? Also, if you don't mind sharing, what did you get on the math SATs? All of this "getting a B isn't too difficult" talk is probably because, either, you guys are extremely smart or what you are saying is the truth... I am going to guess your score was above 700... I am not great at math (average of 680 Math score on about 6 practice tests), does this mean I will have that much more trouble with engineering classes than your typical engineering student?</p>

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<p>I got a 770 on the SAT I math, 790 on Math IIc, and 710 on Math Ic.</p>

<p>I'm actually not that great in math either, I barely got a B in my Calc 3D course there freshman year, though I did get an 89 in the following Differential Equations class (either way, still a B on your transcript).</p>

<p>I was over a 3.5 GPA, which is fairly good for CMU engineering, and wound up with mostly high Bs and low-mid As. It's pretty rare there to get over a 96% in any technical class, the only times I've managed that (or knew people that did) were in classes where the professor was unreasonably easy).</p>

<p>I wouldn't attribute it to the people there being exceptionally smart, since I still knew a lot of people tha that hard to work pretty hard to be sure they were going to get a B in the class, but, even by their own admission, getting a C wasn't very likely. You're way more likely to get a 3.0 because you get all Bs than because you get a mix of Cs and As.</p>

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<p>Most of the engineering courses I've taken have been on a C+/B- or B-/B curve. Getting an A is incredibly challenging and even a B requires a great deal of work. However, the school at least recognizes this harsh grading and is why one can graduate with honors with a 3.2 GPA where the literature, science, and the arts college requires over a 3.6</p>

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<p>i went to Michigan Engineering as well, and MatthewM, that sounds about right, the lower level courses tended to be more C+/B- average, and higher courses more B-/B average. It was never easy getting a B-, you need to be very lucky to get A's. I knew plenty of people who worked very hard to get Cs. Failing isn't that hard to do either, for every engineering class I took, there were always 3-6 people who had below C-.</p>

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<p>keefer: 3-6 people out of how many?</p>

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<p>30-60, so basically, the bottom 10%.</p>

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<p>
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I got a 770 on the SAT I math, 790 on Math IIc, and 710 on Math Ic.</p>

<p>I'm actually not that great in math either, I barely got a B in my Calc 3D course there freshman year, though I did get an 89 in the following Differential Equations class (either way, still a B on your transcript).

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Your math SAT I score is in the top 2%. Plenty "great" at math.</p>

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I was over a 3.5 GPA, which is fairly good for CMU engineering, and wound up with mostly high Bs and low-mid As. It's pretty rare there to get over a 96% in any technical class, the only times I've managed that (or knew people that did) were in classes where the professor was unreasonably easy).

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<p>What percentile is a 3.5 GPA?</p>