This is exactly what frustrates me about Engineering

College Majors Engineering Majors
1

<p>Taking Calculus III this semester with a Chinese professor. I can't hardly understand her so I have considered not going to class anymore but because I care, I keep going and everyday I feel like I leave the classroom more confused. Listening to this woman speak for 50 minutes, 4 days a week is worse than torture.</p>

<p>She is obsessed with proofs, so she would rather spend 10 minutes doing some fancy vector proof example that most people can't even understand than explaining something in intelligible English.</p>

<p>Test I, I got a 58. 60% is passing according to the syllabus. Some kid asked her in class the other day, Do you grade on a curve? Answer "Sorry, can't say" I was like WT*?</p>

<p>So we have a near worthless professor, a near worthless textbook (Purcell, Varberg and Rigdon) and a lot of very stressed students.</p>

<p>Today, I found out about Paul's Calculus Notes and I think for the first time this semester, I am starting to understand the material. Not getting too excited about it yet, but this is my last resort and perhaps the only resource I feel can help me get through this course with a good grade, hopefully.</p>

<p>My goal is to get a solid B. Not that out of reach but with so much crap working against you, I can understand why so many people in my class just text for 50 minutes while this woman speaks. </p>

<p>I was looking at the grades for Exam 1 as they were passing the exams around, I saw scores as low as 15, and as high as 100. Gotta love it!</p>

2

<p>Yeah, that’s an issue at my school: a lot of the science and math professors have thick accents rendering them hard to understand. I suck at self studying, which is a small reason I failed my calculus and chem classes last semester.</p>

3

<p>My only grip is when you have professors that don’t care. Accents I can put up with. </p>

<p>But I’ve heard about professors (at my university) showing up late for their own lectures, constantly forgetting their own notes and then being unable to do much during the lecture, having no idea what they’re doing, and/or constantly changing their office hours making it difficult to get help.</p>

<p>There’s also a professor that assigns somewhere like 53 problems for an engineering math course’s weekly homework while other professors assign around a dozen problems. And he grades them for work and correction, by himself, so there’s a severe delay between collecting them and posting their grades.</p>

4

<p>I understand your frustration. You shouldn’t have to endure that kind of torture. However, this problem isn’t exactly an “engineering” problem. The field can still be, IMHO, a very exciting field to be in.</p>

<p>You do need to be proactive about this situation and get past it;</p>

<p>First, complain loudly to the school and have your classmates complain loudly as well. Make an appointment with her department head to deliver your complaint personally. Don’t be mean, but make the point that her accent gets in the way of her teaching. This won’t help you per se, but the school should take notice and not have her teach that class.</p>

<p>Form a study group. You can learn from each other a lot better than struggling by yourself.</p>

<p>As you have discovered, there are many texts covering this subject and some are better than others. Although it can get expensive, do some research and find another text that you can understand. Maybe your study group can go in together and share the book. Look online for used textbooks as they can be much cheaper.</p>

5

<p>Meeting with the department head is 1) unlikely to occur given the packed schedule of a department head, 2) unlikely to net any positive results, and 3) more likely to net negative results, especially if the professor learns that you did it.</p>

<p>Do not go above the professor’s head to the department head, particularly if you haven’t already attempted to discuss the issue with the professor.</p>

6

<p>As I have often said in this board, much to the chagrin of other posters, is that math / chem / phys departments are university profit centers and not necessarily weed-out sections. The incremental hassle of more students can be handled by adding more TA’s. </p>

<p>In other departments failure rates like Calc III would have the administration going off the roof, but in Math/etc departments this is a badge of honor to show how tough students need to be. Pfeh.</p>

<p>And this is before we throw thick accents into the picture.</p>

7

<p>It seems that Math classes in Engineering are poorly taught everywhere…</p>

<p>Lets not forget the infamous weeder out class…Calc 2. </p>

8

<p>Say it with me now: weed out classes are not real.</p>

9

<p>^Agreed with bonehead.</p>

<p>They might be difficult and challenging classes, yes, but they are usually necessary to an engineering education. It helps make better engineers. They’re good for you.</p>

10

<p>What’s engineering without a firm basis in mathematics. </p>

11

<p>@PeterW Plumbing.</p>

12

<p>Wait until your future engineering client is Chinese or a foreigner and you can’t understand them. Anyway in this day and age, you have YouTube to turn to when your professors aren’t up to par. Also use ratemyprofessor.com.</p>

13

<p>Just do better. No class is gonna fail 50% of the class, and if a professor tries I’m certain the department would get involved and figure something out. Just do better than average.</p>

<p>Chances are if the average grade is ~60% that’s not going to be a D or something, it’ll be a B- or so. </p>

14

<p>There’s multiple aspects of this - one is teaching skills, or lack thereof, the other is bad books, yet another is lousy TA’s, yet another is nonsense homework for nonsense grade, and so on. </p>

<p>The best Calc II (for the Basket Weaving Sciences but still) I saw was DD1’s Community College guy (she took it in the summer while at home). The guy was there because he wanted to teach, he taught well, homework was at Kumon level of effort and amount, and counted for 30% of the grade. Easily 3x to 4x the amount of homework I was used to. Another 10% for an interesting project plus class participation, and 3 tests of 20% each. The online homework system was key to all this, lots of problems, many different for everyone, so unless your kid sister is a math major… Plus a good down to earth book. Tests were half traditional problems and half word problems to show you can apply what you learned. </p>

<p>Maybe this won’t work in Engineering, I don’t know. But the traditional 1000 students, foreign prof, foreign TA’s, lousy textbook, and 10% homeworks is not working very well either. </p>

15

<p>Homework often counts for 10% of the grade to combat cheating. If people are just going to buy the book answer keys and share them with each other or use the answer bank their fraternity keeps on file from previous semesters, then counting homework as 30% of the grade is pretty silly because it will tend to inflate grades and penalize those who don’t cheat. Unless, of course, you flat out give every student the answer key and say have at it, in which case at least it’s fair, though grades would still be artificially high. That isn’t as large an issue at community colleges where the student turnover rate is higher and there are no persistent institutions like fraternities that can hang onto answers like that. At the very least, the cheaters are going to have to work for it.</p>

<p>That said, I am not trying to imply that early mathematics courses couldn’t use a nice improvement in quality. The thing is, people who play the weed out card and claim the professor is simply out to fail everyone are just making excuses 99 times out of 100. The real problem is multifold and much more complicated to fix.</p>

<p>For one, students are often unprepared for the rigors of a university math course for a number of reasons ranging from poor high school preparation to poor study habits, and they often struggle at first in the university setting, which just happens to coincide with when all the “weed out” classes occur. No one ever seems to stop to consider that the reason later classes don’t seem as ridiculous and hard may just be that they have gotten wiser and developed better habits. They are just too quick to play the victim card.</p>

<p>Another part of the problem is that the newest professors with the least teaching experience often get assigned to those early classes that none of the older tenured folks want to teach. Generally, the older faculty put in their time teaching those low level courses and really would rather spend their teaching time teaching the more specialized courses associated with their interests. They often get their way.</p>

<p>The last thing is that those early, large classes are increasingly taught by part-time faculty (adjunct professors). They are generally paid very poorly and have 4 or 5 courses to teach in a semester. Even the best teachers can be quickly demotivated by being extremely overworked while extremely underpaid. In engineering departments this isn’t usually a problem because they have enough money to pay for tenure-track faculty, but in some of those early departments like chemistry and math, adjunct faculty outnumber tenure-track faculty. It’s a real problem.</p>

<p>When I was in the first year or so of my undergraduate studies, I probably would have been right there with a lot of the folks here talking about weed out classes and being mad that professors were intentionally making life hard on the students. After spending time getting to know a sizable number of professors personally and getting closer to the issue and teaching classes myself, I really can say that I believe the actual occurrence of that is quite rare. You get a few real jerks who are teaching to make people miserable, but the vast majority legitimately would like to see their students succeed. Instead, the problems are the ones listed above, and they aren’t easy to solve.</p>

<p>To solve the first one, you have to reform K-12 education, which means tackling some powerful national political forces and institutional inertia. It needs to happen, but it is not something that will come easy. The second issue is easier to fix, as you just need to convince departments to require older faculty to teach earlier classes from time to time. Of course, then the younger professors are just going to be earning their sea legs in the higher classes, so you are pretty much screwed either way there. The last one could be solved pretty simply if someone could convince US News to include the adjunct to tenure-track ratio (or else not count adjuncts in the faculty to student ratio) in their rankings and penalize schools who fall to far on the wrong side of it. Otherwise the schools have no economic incentive to rectify that.</p>

16

<p>With regards to the professor saying “Sorry, can’t say” this isn’t necessarily something you ought to sat WT* to because curves might not necessarily be determined yet if at all. For example, at my university, Linear Algebra students may or may not get a curve bonus depending on the quiz and final grades by the end of the semester. So with your professor saying that she “can’t say” she may be refering to such a policy or simply that she is unsure whether or not a curve is warranted because perhaps while a few students got under 60, the majority got over.</p>

<p>Frankly, a flat curve regardless of student achievement or underachievement is simply silly. The only purpose of a curve ought to be to even out grades between different professors.</p>

<p>Also, many people who think that the course is too hard may simply give up part way (and thus end up with a 15) while others don’t give up and actively seek outside help and perhaps get a higher grade or even a 100. And while proofs are not necessarily useful for applying a certain formula or theorem, knowing why something is true can offer unique insight into the workings or a formula or theorem which can certainly bolster udnerstanding.</p>

17

<p>This may sound harsh, but the best you can do is suck it up, focus, and do the best you can rather than spend your time complaining on forums online. The unfortunate reality in many college courses is that the professors do not care about teaching, cannot teach well, or both. Make use of all the resources you can, including TAs and classmates. The ability to learn independently and teach yourself is an invaluable skill that is best to develop now.</p>

18

<p>You will have harder classes in the future and also have worse professors. A lot of college isn’t learning material that’s useful, it’s testing and teaching you on your ability to learn. Your professor isn’t good, well that sucks, go learn the material by yourself. You’re doing the right thing finding the online notes, keep that up. Stay motivated, don’t blame the system. You’re paying the money, get the most out of it. You’ll make it brah.</p>

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<p>Bonehead, while I agree with everything you’ve said, the OP’s first issue was that he couldn’t understand the instructor’s heavy accent. That’s outrageous. Students and their families are paying for an education at an American university. The deserve instructors (adjunct or not) that have deep knowledge of the subject matter, the ability to clearly explain the material (ie teach it), and the motivation to care enough about each student enough to teach the material as if they are their only student. Those students who belong in the class, leaving off students in over their heads, deserve no less. Adjuncts are overburdened and underpaid, and I hope US News takes up your suggestions, but an instructor that cannot speak English clearly enough to be understood should not be allowed to instruct students whose first language is English regardless of their qualifications or motivation. That goes for TAs too.</p>

<p>As for the “accept reality” advice of some posters, that is unfortunately true OP. You’re ultimately responsible for learning. Engineering programs differ from institution to institution, and Bonehead clearly states many of the reasons why, but I have a particular bone (sorry Bonehead) to pick with instructors/TAs that cannot be understood by the majority of their students. If you can’t understand a person when you’re conversing about something as mundane as the weather, it’s a herculean task to understand them when they’re attempting to impart their (possibly) deep knowledge of as complex a subject as university level math to their students, and department heads, engineering colleges, and universities need to be called on that when they hire people to instruct. Give them the “weather” test…then look at their academic qualifications, and their motivation to teach in an overworked and underpaid profession.</p>

20

<p>What weather test is that? Every single (tenure-track) faculty member that is hired has to stand up in front of the department (and often graduate students) and give an hour-long presentation on his or her research. The whole point is to assess the candidate’s oral communication skills. every single one has satisfactorily passed that hurdle on the way to being hired, implying that other department members and students have found it quite possible to understand him or her. What more would you have them do? TOEFL for faculty jobs? Stop hiring anyone whose native language isn’t English? It’s not something you can just wave your hands at and it will go away.</p>

<p>About the best you could hope for is job offers conditional on taking classes aimed at helping improve their grasp on the english language if that is the primary language of instruction.</p>