<p>But WHY? Why are Engineering matriculants “more susceptible” to the “natural process” of finding other subjects and evolving “interests” that hume/lit majors? </p>
<p>If true, why don’t the Cornell (and Stanford) adcoms find other matriculants? Find some who will stay in their college, i.e., an even higher retention? Do such matriculants not exist in the US? Or does the weeding out process (A’s capped at 33%), encourage them to look elsewhere? Say, to a Russian Lit major where the mean gpa is 3.8 (@ Dartmouth)?</p>
<p>Boy, what did I do to deserve all this attention? </p>
<p>I made a rather simple and generic point … that really does not deserve to be twisted and churned into something I did not write.</p>
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<p>Doesn’t that depend entirely on your personal definition of talent? As far as less work, although this might be a sample of N=1, but I found some of the STEM classes to be far from challenging. I do not think that you can reach such a conclusion without belying plenty of individal anecdotal evidence. For some, the easier classes (easy A in the context of this thread) could be found in the STEM curriculum. All that would be needed is plenty of foreign friends or frat brothers with an extensive database of solutions. After all, there is a little risk of plagiarizing a math problem! On the other hand, there are plenty of lit/hum classes that require both work and … talent. </p>
<p>Please note that I find myself OFTEN in awe of what my friends can accomplish in math or sciences (or in the arts for that matter) but no less than other friends can do in other subjects.</p>
<p>If you guys want to establish that STEM classes are harder and that the STEM students are better or work harder, so be it. As far as I know, this is true in some cases, and blatantly wrong in other cases. </p>
<p>Regarding Cornell, because it has great programs in a wide variety of areas, outside of engineering as well as inside it, hence disproportionately attracts that subset of engineering students who have broad, or dual, interests which include some of those other areas outside engineering too. I thought I said that already.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, its graduation rate equaled or exceeded those of reputed liberal arts colleges such as Oberlin, Colorado College,Kenyon,Franklin & Marshall in this 2007 US News I’m looking at. Which to me is pretty darned good, considering it is a specialized program that some people find out they aren’t that interested in. To imply equivalence vs. liberal arts college majors is a strawman argument, IMO, they are not vocationally oriented, the engineering ones are, and if you have decided against that vocation it is quite reasonably far more likely you will leave than in the other case.</p>
<p>FWIW, while I agree that traditionally engineering programs have tended to have stiffer grading policies than humanities programs, this is not as big a problem for everyone as one might expect. Because engineering employers and engineering graduate schools are aware of the relevant grading policies, and proceed accordingly. Judging from the proportion of engineers who wind up in MBA programs it would seem that business schools also find a way to make the appropriate adjustments.</p>
<p>It’s only when engineers go outside their usual “habitats”, where evaluators do not adjust for varying grading practices, that there may be a problem. Those applying to MD and JD programs may have some cause for concern. But most people know this before they matriculate to a college, and hence tend not to matriculate to engineering colleges in the first place. Therefore stiffer grading affecting JD or MD aspirations should not be a huge reason for attrition from engineering colleges.</p>
<p>I get all that (#125), but it still doesn’t answer the question of, 'Why do engineering programs (and other STEM) courses have “stiffer grading policies that humanities programs”? What is the academic justification for one-third A’s? Conversely, what is the academic justification for the more liberal grading policies in hume/lit (two-thirds A’s)?</p>
<p>For a country spending hundreds of millions with a goal of training more STEM majors , it appears to me as goal-conflict.</p>
<p>You should feel proud that you brought up an interesting (albeit IMO wrong) counterargument. </p>
<p>Or at least, I thought you did. See below. </p>
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<p>If you think your arguments are being twisted, then by all means untwist them. Restate in your own words what you meant (and didn’t mean). </p>
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<p>Actually, I think it depends most crucially on the definition of the professors who are running those courses. But that only highlights the point: isn’t it interesting that humanities professors always seem to find their students, on average, to be “more talented” than how engineering professors find their students? Again, why the asymmetry? </p>
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<p>The only other explanation, which you posited (or at least I thought you did) is that humanities students tend to match themselves far more efficiently with appropriate classes that fit their talents than do engineering students. But that then leaves hanging the question as to why humanities students seem to be so much more adroit at sorting themselves appropriately. </p>
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<p>You didn’t? So what’s this quote I see in post #115: </p>
<p>“Not sure why this is addressed to me, but in the case of Cornell, I would agree that there there is a problem in their admission process.”</p>
<p>Note that this was in reference to my discussion of the Cornell College of Engineering. What, pray tell, were you talking about then, if not about the deficiencies of its admissions process? </p>
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<p>This is actually a nonsequitur on two levels. The mere fact that Cornell may “attract” engineering students who have broad interests doesn’t mean that Cornell should then admit such students to the engineering school. You would think that Cornell’s engineering school would actually admit students who are first and foremost talented in engineering - talented enough to obtain strong engineering grades. Why admit an engineering student who is just going to perform terribly in engineering courses, regardless of how broad his other interests may be? If anything, that student should be admitted to CAS, but not to Engineering. Hence, this is not an appropriate explanation as to why Cornell engineers earn worse grades than do Cornell humanities students. </p>
<p>Secondly, because you said that Cornell is a broad-based school that attracts engineering students with wide interests (to which I agree), I would also expect Cornell to attract humanities students with wide interests that would span to engineering. {If not, then you have to ask why Cornell admits multitalented engineers, but singularly focused humanities students.} Yet, honestly, how many Cornell humanities majors fill their electives with engineering courses, vs. how many Cornell engineering majors fill their electives with humanities? Engineering students often times talk quite openly about poaching’ humanities courses as ‘GPA-boosters’. How many humanities students ‘poach’ engineering courses as ‘GPA-boosters’? </p>
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<p>But you would surely then agree that it is a serious problem with people not choosing engineering (or science) in the first place. They therefore don’t count as engineering ‘attrition’ because they never started in engineering at all. </p>
<p>To restate one of my former quotes:</p>
<p>…Romer isn’t the only one that thinks unequal grading practices drive students from science. Ronald G.
Ehrenberg, director of Cornell University’s Higher Education Research Institute and an economics
professor there, recalled a student who got an 85 on a test, which was above the mean, coming up to him
and saying, “I’m dropping your class, because the best I can do is an A-, and I’m going to Stanford Law
School.” Part of the problem Ehrenberg said, is that students who want to keep law school as an option
will tend away from quantitative courses because it’s clear to them that disproportionate grade inflation
in the humanities and less quantitative social sciences will give them a boost.</p>
<p>If one of our national goals is to encourage more youths to study STEM, as Barack Obama and other Presidents before him have proposed, then we need to remove these perverse incentives for them to shy away from those majors. Either that, or we need to stop law/med-schools from comparing cross-field GPA’s without appropriate correction factors. Students rationally conclude that studying STEM might be hurting their career prospects due to poor grades. </p>
<p>Now, if you say that having more STEM graduates is not really a national priority at all, then that’s a different story entirely. Then that means that we probably shouldn’t be investing hundreds of millions of dollars to be training more such graduates.</p>
<p>If engineering employers/grad-schools and maybe even MBA programs are going to make the necessary adjustments anyway, then that means there is no reason for engineering courses not to adopt the same grading policies as the humanities. So why not have them also hand out 2/3 of all grades as A’s? That’s what the humanities seem to do, so why not engineering also? Then engineering employers and grad schools will surely once again make the necessary adjustments accordingly (probably be demanding higher engineering grades for purposes of jobs and admissions), right? </p>
<p>In that way, the prospects of engineering students who want to pursue other opportunities after their engineering degrees such as law school, med-school, Marshall Scholarships (which demand a minimum 3.8 GPA to even apply, without regard to major), will not be harmed. That would seem to be an optimal solution, would it not? So why not do this?</p>
<p>Sakky, inasmuch as I really do not want to debate this issue ad nauseam, I do feel that your recital of my posts is incorrect. Hence, I will reply … again. So, let me correct the quotations for you:</p>
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<p>I am still puzzled how you are able to weave my above reply (with or without smilies) into this:</p>
<p>So to clear the air, are you saying that you believe there is a problem with Cornell’s engineering admissions, or not?</p>
<p>If so, then I was right. If not, then we’re still at a loss to explain why Cornell’s engineering school would apparently admit relatively fewer students who are talented in engineering, compared to Cornell’s CAS which apparently admit a higher percentage of students who are (ostensibly) talented in the CAS majors, particularly in the humanities majors. What does CAS know that the college of engineering does not know?</p>
<p>It might be interesting to compare attrition in other pre-professional majors such as pharmacy, nursing, or hotel management. I suspect the attrition rate is higher in all these fields than it is in English or Art History. Significant differences in employment and compensation prospects presumably influence the choice of majors. These differences, in turn, probably influence motivation and suitability for academic work in the subject matter. </p>
<p>Does anyone have data on undergraduate attrition in Mathematics? What about grade inflation/deflation in this major? Can we agree that Mathematics is just as “hard” as Engineering? If so, yet we find the attrition rate is much lower for Math (even despite similar grading patterns), then that might support monydad’s idea (#118) that self-selection and “fit” are as important as grading (or deliberate weed-out) in explaining high attrition in Engineering.</p>
<p>“Does anyone have data on undergraduate attrition in Mathematics?”
No. Or attrition in Psychology. Or Classics, Or Philosophy. </p>
<p>It could well be the case that 50% of students who enter college thinking they may want to major in Classics wind up switching to another field. Or that 30% of students who start out thinking they want to major in Biology wind up switching to another field. </p>
<p>It could easily be the case that attrition from many individual majors within the umbrella of liberal arts colleges is GREATER than attrition from engineering colleges. But if they switch from say, Biology to economics, or classics to economics, this would be externally invisible since they would still graduate from the same liberal arts college, which houses all of these disparate majors. But if they switch from engineering to economics this would be tracked.</p>
<p>It looks different for engineering in part because the small subset of engineering college majors are usually actually housed in a separate college, so when they decide this profession is not for them and switch out to any non-vocational field their transfer becomes externally visible because it is to a different college.</p>
<p>Then someone can come along and say aha engineering has higher attrition. When actually it may have lower attrition than many liberal arts college disciplines, but the data for inter-major movement within the liberal arts colleges is not tracked.</p>
<p>Since liberal arts colleges generally do not require immediate commitment to a major, to make a comparison you would have to survey freshman year major intent, vs. ultimate major. The fact that you (often) have to commit to engineering from the outset,prematurely in many cases, before one even takes so much as a single course in it, results in a high proportion of its later transfers IMO. Liberal arts colleges do not require such early/ premature commitment to a subset of very specific specialized fields. The range of fields they offer is very broad, unlike engineering, most areas of study fall someplace within their broad purview. Transfer out of the liberal arts college altogether is less likely because the liberal arts college has a very significant proportion of everything there is, all housed inside it.</p>
<p>If administratively they had a separate undergraduate College of Philosophy, that prospective Philosophy students had to matriculate to separately as entering freshmen, before they take so much as a single course in it, you might find that this college had a higher transfer rate than the engineering college does. But they don’t.</p>
<p>The university offers 80 formal majors, but only 8 of them are uniquely offered in the engineering college (4 others are cross-listed). And those 8 pretty much all involve skills and vocational interests that are more the same than different. It stands to reason that, as people learn more and some change their minds, the large predominance of the flow will be out. There are, actually, posts on CC of people who are considering transferring into the engineering college. But that is only worth considering for a few majors, and people can get close enough via majoring in Physics in arts & sciences, or biological engineering in the Ag school, and then doing an engineering master’s. Plus they will have to make up some engineering college courses if they transfer. So most don’t bother, they find it more expedient to tackle it the other way. </p>
<p>Most engineers don’t transfer colleges either, the years I looked at 83% graduated from the engineering college, which is as high a percentage as Kenyon College etc. The vast predominance of their students do not “prefer to attend a different school”. I still don’t understand that comment.</p>
<p>Sakky, for a very intelligent person, you exhibit a very strange conversational and rhetorical style. Why is it so hard for you to simply accept what people say, and so easy to force different words into their mouth, or keyboard in this case. </p>
<p>Since you like to quote from the posts, let me place you on the right path to understand what I wrote with a small explanation. </p>
<p>I used the term admissions in a reply to BB and wrote, “As far as admissions, I am only familiar with schools that do not accept students in specific majors and value a liberal arts education.” That should give you a hint about my willingness to debate Cornell’s ENGINEERING admissions!</p>
<p>Then, in a following post, in which I stated my surprise to be included in the discussion, I made a jocular comment regarding Cornell. For all intents and purposes, it was jab at their … relatively low yield. If you so desire, you could also extend my “jab” at Cornell’s not being the preferred destination of a number of students because of its (relatively) remote and, at times, frigid location.</p>
<p>“relatively” gives a lot of wiggle room, however vs. the mass of colleges and universities in this country I believe Cornell has a relatively high yield, not a relatively low yield. IIRC the university’s admissions yield is 48-49%.</p>
<p>Haha, Monydad, it is obvious that it is hard to please everyone. </p>
<p>In this thread, there has been mentions of HYPS and top professional schools. </p>
<p>Let’s look at the Class of 2013, for simplicity sake:</p>
<p>HYPSM
Harvard University - RD 76%
Princeton University - RD 60%
Yale University - REA 67%
Stanford University - REA 70%
Massachusetts Institute of Technology - EA 64%</p>
<p>Ivy League
University of Pennsylvania - ED 60%
Columbia University - ED 57%
Dartmouth College - ED 48%
Cornell University - ED 48%
Brown University - ED 54%</p>
<p>To offer an additional context, I provided the type of early admission available because having ED admissions (or the use of an extensive waiting list) is one of the best yield crutches. </p>
<p>Of course, it is all relative … depending the field to be compared.</p>
<p>“…there is no reason for engineering courses not to adopt the same grading policies as the humanities.”</p>
<p>Or better, IMO vica versa. Or perhaps somewhere in between. I don’t disagree with you about that. There is no reason why there should be different scales. I don’'t really fully understand why different practices have developed.</p>
<p>But as I said for people who are pusuing their profession it isn’t necessarily a big problem, as long as evaluators know the game. And for those others, who want to go to medical school, law school: They don’t want to be engineers, so what are they doing there, screw 'em. </p>
<p>“In that way, the prospects of engineering students who want to pursue other opportunities after their engineering degrees such as law school, med-school, Marshall Scholarships (which demand a minimum 3.8 GPA to even apply, without regard to major), will not be harmed. That would seem to be an optimal solution, would it not? So why not do this?”</p>
<p>I agree they ought to. On the other hand, one can argue do they really want to encourage large numbers of people who really don’t even think they want to be engineers in the first place to enroll in the engineering college? Then it gets to the point where people who really want CAS but don’t have the interpersonals and intangibles to get in there will be using engineering as a backdoor. It wouldn’t really be an engineering college at all at that point. There’s already a school for that. It’s called “Fu”. (yuck yuck) .</p>
<p>Maybe the tougher grading helps confine enrollment to a greater proportion of the type of people that they really want to be educating in our engnieering programs. The type that actually want to be engineers. Those people aren’t penalized by the tougher system, because the relative scale is known within the profession. </p>
<p>That’s an argument that could be made to the contrary, anyway.</p>
<p>Well, hey, that happens right now with other majors, particularly in the creampuff majors. Let’s be perfectly honest: many American Studies majors are interested in neither Americana, nor, frankly, even in studying. They’re just looking for a 4-year social/dating scene and an undemanding gateway to graduation. If universities as a whole were truly concerned with rigor, you would think that they would have dumped the creampuff majors forthwith, or at least made them far more exacting. </p>
<p>Perhaps more relevantly, most other majors have fully accepted the notion that many - often times most - students in their major, including many of the highest performing students, do not intend to pursue that major professionally. Let’s face it - most history majors do not intend to become historians. Most poli-sci majors do not intend to become political scientists. This holds even for the more rigorous technical majors: many physics majors have no intention of ever becoming professional physicists. {Several of the best physics majors that I know ended up become consultants or Ibankers.} So I don’t see why it would be so controversial for engineering programs to welcome students who may not actually want to work as engineers. The other majors are already doing that.</p>
<p>Really? And pray tell, exactly what difference would that be?</p>
<p>*the average grade awarded to undergraduates taking courses in UW-Madison’s School of Nursing last spring was slightly above 3.8…Nadine Nehls, associate dean for academic programs in the School of Nursing, also defends the relatively high grades distributed to future nurses. She says her school also is a standards-based program that uses a predetermined grading scale.</p>
<p>“We think our standards are quite high, yet it’s possible that in any given class, theoretically there is no limit to how many students might earn an A *</p>
<p>We could also talk about Education/Instruction majors - i.e. majors for future schoolteachers - which are also ostensibly vocational. </p>
<p>*If grades are any indication of on-the-job proficiency, the students graduating from UW-Madison’s department of curriculum and instruction should be very, very good teachers.</p>
<p>According to a Capital Times analysis of publicly available grade information at UW-Madison, the average grade awarded to undergraduates in this department — which develops the teachers of tomorrow — is higher than a 3.9 on a 4.0 scale.*</p>
<p>Standards in American colleges of education are appallingly low, and a sort of anti-knowledge, anti-intellectualism is often apparent. Typically, education students have below-average indicators of college performance (e.g., relatively low high school grades and test scores), yet tend to receive extremely high grades in their education courses. averaging A- or even higher. Research done at the center I direct (the Center for College Affordability & Productivity), took a sample of 174 public institutions with education schools and obtained grade data from campusbuddy.com. Looking at over 1.3 million grades, we found that the average GPA in education classes was 3.65, and 76 percent of students received an A- or better.</p>
<p>*Many schools and colleges of education have been charged by their colleagues from other programs and institutions with being “easy graders”, of having “little or no standards”, or “being devoid of academic rigor.” They suggest that the grades given by education professors are higher than the grades these same students would earn in the more “rigorous academic” courses outside the field of education; consequently education majors’ grades are inflated and/or don’t reflect students’ real ability. *</p>
<p>Pharmacy schools are (at least) 6-year programs and are therefore are not an appropriate comparison to engineering programs that are supposedly completable in 4. I can’t speak for Accounting programs, but I suspect that they are more grade deflated compared to most majors, but not as deflated as engineering. We also as shown above also have education and nursing majors that are apparently notorious for easy grades. </p>
<p>The upshot is that there seems to be no clear relationship between a program being vocational and its grade inflation/deflation. You say that most people get the difference (between vocational and nonvocational majors), but I am clearly not most people, so pray tell, what is that difference? </p>
<p>Specifically, if engineering programs were to raise its grading level such that they might attract more students who may not even be interested in pursuing engineering as a career, why is that necessarily a bad thing? As I have stated on other threads (and which you clearly know, having responded to my posts), right now, plenty of engineering students, particularly at the top engineering programs such as MIT or Stanford, ironically do not take engineering jobs, instead opting for careers in banking or consulting. Some also choose to pursue law or med-school, despite whatever grade deflation they may have suffered. Yet nobody is proposing that these ‘undedicated engineers’ be screened from the engineering major from the very beginning. Since we already have many engineering students who don’t take engineering jobs, what’s wrong with more?</p>