<p>
[quote]
Non-engineers might have it easy, GPA-wise. So what? Is your engineering program structured to prepare you for actually <em>doing</em> engineering work? I should hope so.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I don't know about that. Trust me, there are PLENTY of academic engineers out there who know little more than just solving lots of equations quickly, but don't know much about actually doing the job. In many cases, it is by their own self-admission that they don't really know how to do the job. Heck, I know many grads from MIT who have said that about themselves - that they feel that they are really only academic engineers, but don't actually know how to do anything practical. Of course, these are the guys who generally end up working for McKinsey or Goldman Sachs. </p>
<p>
[quote]
Does the resulting GPA make it harder to switch over to investment banking? Probably. You know what that means? If you know you're going to want to go into investment banking, don't start as an engineer. It's as simple as that.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>And that is EXACTLY the mentality that I question. </p>
<p>It's not that people KNOW that they want to become investment bankers. It's that they think that they MIGHT want to become investment bankers. What you are effectively saying is that by choosing engineering, you are making it difficult for yourself to switch to another career path. You might be amazing enough to be able to make that switch to banking, just like some of the MIT guys I know. But you have made things more difficult for yourself. </p>
<p>The question is then why? Why exatly should engineering make other career paths more difficult to attain? Why should this be?</p>
<p>Let's keep in mind what we're talking about here. Let's be perfectly honest here. Most 17-18 year olds don't really know what career they really want. They don't really know what's out there, they don't really know themselves very well. Come on, how many students of that age really know what they want? Engineering departments are forcing these kids (and that's what they really are - kids) to make a choice before they are truly ready to make that choice. You are effectively asking them to restrict their future choices of career before they even understand what those choices really are all about. </p>
<p>This has 2 possible effects. #1, you end up with some kids who make the bad choice to choose engineering, and then waste time and possibly ruin their academic record before they realize that engineering is not for them. Or, #2, the more risk-averse kids simply don't choose engineering at all, even though they might actually have loved it, for fear that doing so will restrict their future choice of career. Either way, this is inefficient.</p>
<p>Hence, why can't engineering programs simply allow kids a free pass to explore engineering? For example, let's say you try out engineering and do poorly in it and so you switch to something else. Fine. Then all of your bad engineering grades should be expunged. After all, if you're not going to be majoring in chemical engineering anyway, then who cares what grades you got in your chemical engineering classes? Or we could have some variant where all of your engineering grades are graded P/NP with a version of 'shadow grades' (in which you are told privately what letter grade that you would have gotten if the class was graded normally). In that way, you can then decide whether you really want to continue with engineering or not. If not, then no skin off your nose, you can just find some other major to study with a clean slate and the engineering classes you did take won't hurt you. </p>
<p>The fact that most engineering departments refuse to implement techniques like this indicates to me that they actually seem to WANT to give people bad grades. They seem to ENJOY ruining people's futures, including the futures of people who won't become engineers anyway. </p>
<p>
[quote]
P.S. Sakky -- Those CS people writing Grand Theft Auto... you don't think they need to know some pretty serious stuff about the hardware they run on, the physics involved, collision detection algorithms, and the data structures to contain it all? They do all that at >60fps, which is not an easy task. They may not be verifying a critical real-time operating system for a nuclear reactor, but I'd not say that their skills are any less refined. Let's try to keep our examples within our respective skill sets, shall we? Thanks.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>You are assuming that you need harsh grading in order to force people to learn. This is simply not so. Again, let's take the example of med-schools. Most med-schools do not use harsh grading. In fact, many, including most elite ones such as Harvard Medical School and Johns Hopkins, grade on a purely P/NP basis. Yet I think there is little dispute that medical students work extremely hard and learn a LOT, and I also think there is clearly little dispute that HMS and Johns Hopkins produce highly capable physicians. </p>
<p>So if med-schools can do this, why is it so impossible for engineering schools to do this?</p>
<p>Come on, wrprice, let's be honest about what we are talking about here. I think we can agree that there are many things that engineering schools could do to make engineering less harsh. If we were to sit down and be creative, I'm sure we could come up with a laundry list of suggestions.</p>
<p>The real issue is not that alternatives don't exist. The real issue is that the engineering schools DON'T WANT to pursue the alternatives. They WANT it to be hard. They WANT to tag students with bad grades. As for the reasoning, I think it's a matter of 'chronological justice' for the engineering profs. They had to go through hell when they were students in the past, soo now that they are the profs, they want to make sure that today's students go through the same hell. In other words, this is basically hazing. </p>
<p>But this is clearly inappropriate behavior. That's like saying that just because your father beat you when you were a kid, now that you are a father, you should now beat your kid. Instead of trying to obtain 'chronological justice', the engineering community should be trying to determine a way to increase the overall welfare of all parties involved. </p>
<p>There is a difference between HARD work and PUNITIVE work. I know many graduate engineering students at MIT and they have all said to a man that the coursework is hard, but it isn't PUNITIVE, in the sense that they don't feel that the prof is always trying to nail them the way that they felt back in undergrad, when they felt that the profs really were trying to find excuses to screw them over.</p>