My point wasn’t that every premed prereq is taken by most/all eng’g students, but there are overlaps.
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Chemistry: same general chemistry, engineering does not take organic chemistry other than chemical or biomedical. Chemical engineering takes harder versions of general and organic chemistry.
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Well, as you mentioned, some eng’g disciplines do take Orgo.
Not sure what you mean by saying that ChemE takes the harder versions of Gen Chem and Orgo. Not true at MANY schools. Eng’g and premeds typically take the same Gen Chem and Orgo. It’s the nursing majors and others that take the softer “not for majors” versions.
Even if my ChemE premed son hadn’t been premed, he still would have had to complete Bio I with lab.
As for math…Calc 1 can be a weeder class. Those that can’t hack Calc I don’t go further in eng’g, and premed that don’t take Calc 1 can be at a disadvantage.
I know at some schools, business students take business Calc 1… and yes it’s easier than “regular” Calc 1 that math, science, and engineering students take
4A, 4B, 112A, 112B: for chemistry majors
4A, 4B, 112A: for chemical engineering majors (may take 112B as a technical elective)
1A/1AL, 1B, 112A, 112B: for biology majors in the biochemistry option
1A/1AL, 3A/3AL, 3B/3BL: for most biology majors, bioengineering majors, and pre-meds whose majors do not require a different sequence (pre-meds take an upper division biochemistry course for the fourth chemistry course)
1A/1AL: for most other engineering majors (some also require 1B)
Just because UCB has different versions for eng’g and premeds that does not mean that most/all other colleges do. Many have eng’g and premeds taking the same GenChem and Orgo classes…and they are weeders.
It would be interesting to know if this is born out in the statistics. Do students who go to easier colleges fail out of med school at a significantly higher rate than those who go to top schools? If that were a well-documented phenomenon, why would med schools accept anyone from these easier colleges?
I have had to write several letters of recommendation for med school applicants. I never know if they get accepted or not, but one would think there would be so many from “top” schools that no one would ever get accepted from the “lesser” schools at all. If this were the case, it would be well known and no lesser school students would bother trying, so it doesn’t seem to be the case. How then, do lesser school applicants compete with wonder school applicants in the med school fracas?
I’ve been pondering the concept of weeder courses. It sounds like there are some schools that over accept with the idea that they will “weed” down their class size. On the whole I don’t think that is what most schools are attempting to do. I think they just want to make sure you’re prepared both for the future academic work and the time commitment in general.
I think most engineering curriculum are similar regardless of whether or not they require a year of pre-engineering, FYE or whatever they choose to call it. Nearly all are going to require a year of Calculus, Chemistry and Calculus based Physics along with some gen eds. Those courses are required to prepare students for the courses ahead not to weed people out. They provide the bases for nearly all engineering degrees. Those schools which delay the actual major decisions are doing so so that they can get a more accurate assessment of just how many students may be truly interested in given majors based on the number of students who are still interested in engineering and are eligible after the first year. You won’t have half the ME’s or Chem E’s or EE’s leaving after the first year. Those that make it into the major are more likely to be successful.
In Purdue’s case if there is a “weeder” course it is their FYE course. On the whole it’s not the difficulty that weeds students out, it is the time commitment. It’s actually a difficult course to fail if you put in the time. You learn about the various fields of engineering, work on projects with other students and how to delegate and budget time. You learn some basic programming skills and the concept of engineering. The projects and busy work take a LOT of time. The students joke about being on the “Struggle Bus”. Add that to the above courses and some choose not to continue. Some decide that can’t handle the core courses, some give up and some really flunk out. Those that make it through though are more prepared and are less daunted by the time commitment that engineering courses can demand. In some of the more advanced courses there are single problems that can take hours to work out.
I see quite a few comments implying that we would have lots of inferior graduates just because we limited admittance to these programs. This is nonsense. I can tell you that in the IT industry I work with very few programmers from major universities. Many didn’t even study computers in college! I also remember kids when I was college who dropped out of computer science because they didn’t pickup C in a month. Next stop speech major. Here I am many years later and I look back at those kids didn’t get the opportunity and think the college made a huge mistake doing what they did. Seriously, I watch offshore programmers come in droves to gobble up 9 out of 10 IT jobs. These are kids that took the slow road with Indian universities and were given a chance to learn. No joke but while I was visiting companies in Kolkata, there are signs lampposts advertising guaranteed jobs after taking a 2 week courses. Universities are missing the boat when they think every graduate needs to be the perfect student. Haven’t we all learned that academic success does not translate to real life success?
If you know that a weeder class in coming up that is important to your future, you should prepare accordingly. For example, organic chemistry if you want to go to medical school. Take the course elsewhere not for credit in summer. Audit the weeder class without registering for a semester. Study all sorts of online material. Then take the real class in another semester and get your A.
Sure, we all know that money can solve a world of problems. It would be great if any kid who wanted to protect his GPA could do as you suggest. But to take a class over the summer at our local flagship, you’d need several thousand extra dollars and would probably also lose out on potential work income, since you’d likely have trouble fitting in a full time job around the class and lab periods, not to mention study time.
^ Plus there are only 3-4 summers available to college students. I’d think it best to use them for relevant internships, research, volunteering and/or a paid job. For med students or any student, really.
As all colleges courses that one has ever enrolled in (even if taken in hs) must be reported on med school app even if taken for no credit, this may look like one is trying to take an easier pathway.
^None of which would prevent one from buying the book in the summer and reading the heck out of it, working problems, etc. prior to the start of the semester. Yes, even if one has a job.
^^Yes, there is the notion that it is cheating to actually prepare thoroughly before taking a class. Still, if the aim is to get yourself into medical school, you can take MOOCs, watch videos, read books, solve problems, “audit” courses just by sitting in the back, prepare a psychological profile of the professor who will teach the actually weeder course, etc., etc.
I never understood the idea of walking cold into a difficult course, finding yourself overwhelmed, then scrambling to get into a medical school on Grenada or wherever. I was a tutor for a genetics (medical school weeder) course in Canada. Many of the students were totally unprepared and ended up in tears in my office from trying to handle the assignments. But it wasn’t all that difficult, and anyone who had done it five times before would sail through it.
Wherever there is an absolute barrier, that should take priority. You can get experience after graduation if necessary.
Everyone talks about weed out classes for Engineering, Nursing and Pre-Med lol. Did anyone think those majors would be easy? Did anyone think the highest paying majors would be as easy as something like Communications or Sociology? Before you say you want to major in something hard, ask yourself why you want to major in it and make sure you have a passion for it first.
Welcome to the world of college lol. One thing I’ve learned being in college is that teachers definitely do a really great job at preventing students from bs’ing their way through a class. Study, do the homework and just do what your teachers tell you, they aren’t there to lie to you. They want you to succeed!