<p>In various posts that I have seen on CC comments have been made that many of the large engineering programs (UIUC, UMich, Georgia Tech, etc were the examples provided) often weed out a large percentage of their engineers in the first 1-2 years. In reality is this actually the case. My boy is a second semester sophomore in the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan and he only knows of, or heard of, a handful of kids who have dropped out. I don't know for a fact but I expect that the "higher" ranked schools, who may have a larger pool of students seeking admittance, would try to select only those students whom they feel would have the best chances to succeed. "Weeding out" would occur during the pre-enrollment selection process. A high dropout rate in the first 1-2 years would reflect negatively on the school.</p>
<p>The old story of “look to your left, look to your right, those two will not be here at graduation” is a little overstated. Virginia Tech has a graduation rate of 67%. This means graduate with an engineering degree. It does not mean 33% drop out of school, a lot of student will change majors.</p>
<p>[Frequently</a> Asked Questions | Department of Engineering Education | Virginia Tech](<a href=“http://www.enge.vt.edu/Undergraduate/faq.html#WhatisthesuccessrateinEngineeringatVirginiaTech]Frequently”>http://www.enge.vt.edu/Undergraduate/faq.html#WhatisthesuccessrateinEngineeringatVirginiaTech)</p>
<p>Everyone makes way too big a deal about the idea of “weed out” classes. I have never known a professor who intentionally tries to weed out kids in his class. Most professors would like to see their students excel, not fail, and the few who don’t honestly care are usually in the minority. Now, that isn’t to say that all of those professors who want to see the students succeed know how to help them do that effectively, but the point is that they are not intentionally trying to weed kids out.</p>
<p>The real issue is that incoming freshmen are simply not adequately prepared for college coursework, whether academically or motivationally. There a lot of students who get into it thinking it is a quick way to make a good salary without actually having the desire to put in the work required to succeed in engineering. They tend to fail out. There are a lot of kids who just cruised through high school and don’t have the study skills required to succeed in engineering. They either adapt or fail out. There are also a lot of kids who simply aren’t academically prepared. The process for admitting kids tends to keep most academically unqualified kids out, but not all.</p>
<p>The bottom line is just make sure you are in it for the right reason and are willing to work to overcome any shortcomings you may have. For me, I really had to work to get some study skills because I was one of those guys who cruised through high school and had no study skills to speak of. Professors aren’t there to weed you out. People who aren’t willing to put in the work weed themselves out.</p>
<p>Well if it hasn’t happened to him why worry?</p>
<p>I really don’t believe that any school has a intentional “weed out” system in place. All professors that I’ve known what their students to succeed. That said, it does happen. Why?</p>
<p>Some students have great high school records but achieved that only by working at their max. College provides a bigger challange and they don’t have that next gear to move into to get the work done (or are unwilling to get into that next gear as they are having too much “fun”). I saw that happen even at MIT, although it was only a handfull. The lower down the college feed chain, the more likely it is to happen.</p>
<p>I am not TomServo. He’s well into his Computer Engineering classes</p>
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<p>That was me at Carnegie Mellon to a T. I really was in the minority. The other 11 people I should have graduated with (MSE dept.) now have graduate degrees, most with PhD’s. Out of my fraternity (~65) there was only 1 other person that had major problems adjusting like I did. He grew up faster than I did and graduated only 2 years late (opposed to my 11 at a different school altogether).</p>
<p>Hey da6onet, another CMU MSE alumni here! Sorry to hear it didn’t go as well for you. :(</p>
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<p>I knew more students that didn’t have a difficult time in HS, then were either unwilling or unable to learn how to put work into doing assignments. Learning how to study is a real skills, and I felt a lot of us that had already struggled and dealt with non-perfect scores in HS were more prepared for a rigorous college curriculum where you WILL bomb an occasional test or two and need the resiliency to bounce back.</p>
<p>PeterW, a lot of students also don’t drop out of school. They transfer to different majors either because they don’t enjoy engineering as much as they thought they would (Hey, I like math and physics, I should be an engineer!) or struggle too much with the work load. Honestly, a few friends switched out of engineering after halfway through sophomore year. Typically the move is into business, but a few went to math or CS.</p>
<p>The most recent data I could find from NCES had the 6 year graduation rate for engineering students seeking a bachelor’s at 58%. That was 2004, but the numbers for 1996 were very similar, so it doesn’t seem as if it’s increasing too much over time. Of course that doesn’t mean that 42% of the students are just hung out to dry. You can generally transfer out of engineering and still be successful, you may just need a year or two to figure that out.</p>
<p>[Fast</a> Facts](<a href=“http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=40]Fast”>Fast Facts: Undergraduate graduation rates (40))</p>
<p>Another way to look at it - the freshman schedule for an engineering student is designed to measure all of the considerations discussed above. If the basic preparation/mind set is not established, best to find out sooner rather than later.</p>
<p>So yes, it is all “weed out”, but not for the purpose of just reducing class size.</p>
<p>Why worrying to be weed-out or not to be. Just study hard like there is no tomorrow and try shooting for all A’s…then you will be alright. why worry about others?..</p>
<p>So, if others can not make it then you, OP, will blame the school?..</p>
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<p>When I was at RPI, the large 1st and 2nd year classes were graded on a 2.4 normal curve, and every single kid I knew came from the top 10% of their high school class. If you were average in all of your classes, you got all Cs, ended up with a 2.0 and lost your scholarship money.</p>
<p>They have since retooled the curriculum. I hear similar stories still happening, mostly about the state colleges that attract top OOS and international students.</p>
<p>I will say though that being in a 100+ person physics or calc class graded on a curve is a type of environment not suited for everyone. Engineering schools advertising small teacher to student ratios could be more upfront with realities a freshman will face.</p>
<p>Sent from my SCH-I535 using CC</p>
<p>“Why worrying to be weed-out or not to be. Just study hard like there is no tomorrow and try shooting for all A’s…then you will be alright. why worry about others?..”</p>
<p>As if it is really easy to get A’s in Engineering. I study my ass off, so do most of my peers and getting B’s is hard enough, sometimes impossible. I go to Iowa State-an average engineering school, our department is top 20 and so far, engineering has been nothing but a lot of work and mostly mediocre grades.</p>
<p>If studying like there is no tomorrow would automatically translate to A’s in Engineering, it would be great!</p>
<p>Not only that, but I would recommend NOT studying like there’s no tomorrow if there is any way to avoid it. That’s a fast way to burn out. It always important to make sure you maintain some semblance of a normal life outside of school. You work more efficiently when your mind isn’t over tasked anyway.</p>
<p>There is a form of weeding-out that takes place in large state universities. It happens when important freshman classes are taught by profs who can not speak English well. I have seen kids getting turned off because of this. It almost happened in our S2’s case. Fortunately, he was able to compensate by sitting in another section taught by a native English speaker.</p>
<p>For one thing, there are non-native speakers and otherwise bad teachers at the elite privates just like at the large state schools, so that’s hardly fair to claim that phenomenon is exclusive to the state flagships. For another, that’s not really weeding out in the sense that most people think about it in that they aren’t actively trying to prune kids from the program. It’s simply a case of bad teachers turning kids off, which then make their own decision to leave.</p>
<p>I have presented my conspiracy theory on CC a couple times and it seems to generate lots of flames… My theory (based on observation and experience at a couple US schools, a directional state and a top flagship state school) suggests that the weeding out is largely due to the emphasis on calculus based math, with high failure rates, necessitating taking the class several times and keeping math (or science) department enrollments and funding artificially high.</p>
<p>In other words, the reason for the high failure rate on many schools (i.e. the weed-out) is so that the math/science departments, i.e. those who do the most ‘weeding’, can maintain high enrollments and continue to receive enrollment based funding. In a large 30k state flagship the math department could be huge, and the more ‘churn’ the more money.</p>
<p>Another theory that premed students may be familiar with the old wives tale about biology/chem/phys profs not being so helpful with premed students (‘they are in it for the A and the med school worthy GPA’) and grading accordingly. Is it too much to extrapolate this happening in math also for hapless engineering students (‘while I teach this here calculus 2 as an assistant prof for $60k a year with a PhD and lots of experience those punks will go to Google with a BS and get $120k/year’)</p>
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<p>The fatal flaw in this argument is the idea that these departments get any meaningful percentage of their operating income from tuition. Generally, tuition is basically pocket change in the overall budget of STEM departments. The real money comes from the overhead from research grants, which is why there is such an emphasis on the faculty publishing and why getting a tenure-track position (and ultimately tenure) depends so much on research output. Keeping a handful of kids perpetually taking calculus 1 and 2 won’t even be a drop in the bucket.</p>
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<p>I’d also refute this argument. For one, assistant professors at a research university in STEM fields generally start out with more than $60k/year while very, very rarely do students with a BS and no experience start out at $120k/year. Even if that was the case, professors don’t get that job for the money. If they were good enough and passionate enough to get that job, then they got it because they convinced a hiring committee that they were more qualified, more passionate, and a better fit for the department than probably 100 other candidates applying to that same position. The end result is that they are there in academe because they want to be, not because they couldn’t get a job at Google, so I don’t think high failure rates in those classes has anything to do with the professors being bitter over salary.</p>
<p>The reason it happens is because of several factors, but the biggest of which - in my observation - is the tendency for incoming students to be underprepared, the tendency for students to enter STEM fields for money instead of passion and therefore be undermotivated, and the fact that math teachers in general are known for being rather strange and tend to speak in tongues in the view of fresh college students. The ones who don’t adapt struggle, simple as that.</p>