It sounds from his scores and grades that he is perfectly capable of doing well in engineering. It doesn’t actually take 5’s on every AP and crazy high SAT scores to do well in college. He will have to work very hard, just like everyone else. He should use the tutoring center at his college, go to office hours, do his homework, just like everyone else. His study skills and willingness to be persistent and seek help when he needs it are more likely to determine his success in engineering than the test scores he currently has.
If he is good in Physics I wouldn’t worry about it. My daughter is going into Chem and she isn’t a math superstar, but she’s good enough. She scored a 27 on the math section of the ACT which drug her score down, but she got a 32 in science. Barely squeezed out an A in Junior calculus and she’s taking AP Calc this year. He’ll be fine.
@SC Anteater @bodangles is making an extremely important point that most Americans do not understand. Math is much more about practice and hard work than ability. Work hard and you will make it.
ucbalumnus, you quoted my post out of context or perhaps I was not clear. Of course I understand that civil engineering is related to “building things.” I believe I was trying to say that many careers relate to “building things,” sometimes literally and sometimes not. My son always said that building things with legos led to his interest in programming and computer science because the decisions are binary. Architecture is another obvious one. I was just curious how the very specific path of civil engineering was chosen.