Why do people say that Engineering major is a "GPA killer"?

[aegrisomnia]

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I’m simply providing appropriate context. Why do engineering programs feel that it is appropriate to weed out boatloads of students, but HASS majors don’t?

How is bringing up a tangentially related subject hitherto undiscussed providing context? Looks like a desperate grab to turn this thread into another of your “engineering is hard, liberal arts is easy, business is evil” threads. Or is that off base?</p>

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It seems to me that what it means is that those majors aren’t particularly challenging in the first place. After all, far more former engineering students who perform poorly will migrate to HASS than the reverse. {How many former English majors will decry that they performed poorly and so, if they want to graduate, they have ‘no choice’ but to major in chemical engineering?}

So what if they aren’t particularly challenging in the first place? That doesn’t change the fact that students who are majoring in that and succeed are, indeed, prepared for the challenges of the major. You’re only splitting hairs over the difficulty of the challenges, not answering my question: if you succeed at something, you are prepared for the challenge of it. If liberal arts is easier than engineering, that’s another discussion, and frankly I’d rather not get you started on this again.</p>

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Huh, I would argue that it is especially true in ST-M curricula. After all, how many ST-M problem sets of exams - which comprise the overwhelming majority of the grading - allow you to ‘be creative’ about the answers you provide? If you don’t execute the specific procedure that the solution key supports, you will fail. How exactly is that conductive towards creativity?

Computer science curricula often give tests in programming courses where they ask you to design an algorithm or piece of code, or to design some sort of language or automaton, which is an inherently creative process. Doing anything more than teaching the syntax and asking students to exercise creativity would be to give them the answer. Consider an example. Problem: write a sorting function in C. Student’s question: how do you want me to write it? Instructor’s answer: that’s your problem. Essentially every assignment in CS is similar: you are taught the syntax and semantics and are required to demonstrate that you can use it to solve problems. Undergraduate mathematics is essentially the same, at least once you get past the calculus/diffy-Q service courses. Those are for engineering majors, anyway.</p>