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I'm not gonna call Mr. Payne a liar, but I think he is basing his assessment on hearsay and rumors.
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No. I am not. This is according to posted grades. Yes, it's ridiculous. Yes, I understand that most schools and most professors are not like this. I go to Cal Poly. And most classes are as described, with failing (F) grades being like 5-10% of a class.</p>
<p>And the professor is Locascio. Any ME coming from Poly in the last 15 years has heard of him. If you get a class with him, you will work your balls off for an F.</p>
<p>And also, I've seen other professors have absurdly high fail rates. My roommate's freshman CS 101 class had a drop+fail rate of 50%+. That was not repeated in the CS department, but it did happen.</p>
<p>Fair enough. My main objection to your posts was that it seemed that you were implying it was a systemic problem, when clearly it is an isolated incident. There is no doubt in my mind that there have been instances with very high failure rates on a class-by-class basis. But on the whole, these classes are rare and there is no need to scare people away from engineering by claiming that they will be in classes with failure rates this high. </p>
<p>As you noted, the typical failure rate in most classes is roughly 10%. But back to the main topic at hand, failure rates in weeder classes might be as high as 20%. And as I posted earlier, it would be common that 60% of the class gets a C or worse. So indeed weeder classes do exist and do wreak havoc on GPAs.. but they are also not as bad as some rumors suggest.</p>
<p>in my experience professors don't like to fail people (I am counting Ds and D+s here), as it looks bad on them and the department...yes a lot of people do get C-s but that's different.</p>
in my experience professors don't like to fail people (I am counting Ds and D+s here), as it looks bad on them and the department...yes a lot of people do get C-s but that's different.
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The professors that tend to fail people a lot are usually ones that are very experienced and have a reputation of being a tough, yet good professor.</p>
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The professors that tend to fail people a lot are usually ones that are very experienced and have a reputation of being a tough, yet good professor.
<p>This may be a hard question to answer but what is the GPA of an average engineering student? Is it harder to get into, say business school, if you do engineering undergrad because of other applicants who did not take an engineering major, and consequently have higher GPA's?</p>
<p>I would say that many of the professors that I've seen with high failure rates were simply jerks with ego problems. Not great teachers. If they were so great there would be more students who would pass.</p>
<p>My GPA was low 2s and I got into a good business school (top 25)... not Harvard, but then I never wanted to go there. The Admins I spoke to told me that they weigh engineering gpas differently then gpas of those in the letters. Also, you will generally have a higher Quant score on your GMAT if you are an engineer. However, if you want to get into a top 20 business school and you think you'll get a low gpa in engineering, I wouldn't do the engineering. GPA does count.</p>
<p>You will have to sacrifice grades or a life in order to be an engineer. I chose grades. Failing is a part of being an engineer. Not failing in classes so much, but testing the null hypothesis successfully happens unintentionally all the time. Bad engineers don't know this.</p>
<p>The fact that they weigh engineering GPA's differently really helps out my decision...I'm a senior in high school and I want to go into biomedical engineering but I also like business, so I wanted to make sure that if I decided that engineering is not my thing, I can get into a good business school for an MBA. By the way, what kind of engineering did you study japher, and did you go into business school right out of graduation of undergrad?</p>
<p>I'm a Chemical Engineering grad. I've been out for 8 years and I'm about to start my MBA.</p>
<p>I like engineering, and have a chemical/process engineer in pharm/biotech industry since I graduated. I enjoy what I do, however I find that I am a people person, and while engineering employs my troubleshooting and problem solving skills it doesn't keep me entertained or interactive with other people.</p>
<p>I am going into business so that I can utilize my people skills and get to a decision making level higher then whether or not processes need to be optimized and how to go about that doing that.</p>
<p>If you can get a degree in engineering and the gpa isn't up to stuff then GMAT and work experience will be definitly be looked at before it's thrown in the reject pile. However, IMO, if you have a lousy gpa in something like history, they won't even get to your work history.</p>