<p>
</p>
<p>Surely plenty of students in the first two years of humanities or social science majors are lazy or unprepared. Yet you don’t really see them being weeded out or being consigned to terrible grades. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>But you’re not really taught original thinking and creativity in most engineering courses. In fact, ironically, you’re mostly taught the exact opposite. The vast majority of engineering courses are graded via a combination of problem set and exam questions for which there is only one, or at most a handful, of ‘correct’ procedures. You can’t simply argue that you would have ‘solved’ a particular exam via a highly creative idea that is not sanctioned by the official solution key, and if you try, you’ll fail the exam. </p>
<p>The one notable exception is the capstone design course where creativity is indeed encouraged. But that’s just one course, usually taken in the final year, after students have been actively discouraged for years from being creative on pain of failing. Honestly, how much design creativity can you expect at that point?</p>