<p>Good for you. And I am quite confident that I have a strong grasp upon the topic as well. </p>
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<p>Now we’re having a real discussion rather than merely engaging in a silly macho contest about whose school is better (which, trust me, you’re not going to win). </p>
<p>And I agree with you that what you said is what engineering education hopes to do. But man can’t live on hope alone. The real question is, does engineering education actually provide (rather merely hope to provide) the intellectual foundation necessary for future creativity? To me, that’s very much an open question. </p>
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If you ever saw the movie Apollo 13, the engineers in the movie were depicted in creating all kinds of ad-hoc solutions to seemingly impossible problems, like building a C02 extractor with socks, paper and tapes. That was creativity in engineering at its best.[ /quote]</p>
<p>Indeed, that was engineering creativity at its best - which happened to be conducted at NASA during the 1960’s which (presumably) recruited the very best engineers in the world who were picked precisely for their creative potential. But what about the average engineers - that is to say, all the engineers that NASA and other elite tech employers didn’t recruit? How creative are those engineers? </p>
<p>And that’s the real question - not how creative are a highly elite and exactingly selected group of engineers - but rather how creative is the average engineer? To only look at NASA and other high-end employers is to sample on the dependent variable.</p>
<p>I actually never asked you about your school’s name. Just your training and profession and that was only to know if you ever did anything remotely engineering.</p>
Give me a break. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.</p>
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When did we start talking about humanities and social science majors? On an unrelated note, how are they unprepared for the challenges of the major if they aren’t being weeded out? Doesn’t that mean that they are indeed prepared for the challenges of those majors? Maybe they just have a more realistic appraisal of their interests or abilities… not the worst character trait to have. </p>
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Huh. I know this isn’t true for the most part in ST-M curricula… if it is true in engineering, maybe educators need to rethink how they approach engineering pedagogy.</p>
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Sounds like a problem with your school (indeed, maybe with most or all schools; just pointing out this isn’t a fundamental rule, and that you could make these classes arbitrarily tough). Maybe liberal arts programs have watered down curricula because they get a lot of cocky, dumb engineers who refuse to think hard and insist on skating by with good grades?</p>
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Clearly that doesn’t make one harder than the other. Counterexamples available upon request.</p>
<p>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? </p>
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<p>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?} </p>
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<p>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?</p>
<p>I would actually argue that they’ve watered down the curricula because they have plenty of cocky dumb students of all stripes - not just engineers specifically - who refuse to think hard and insist on skating by with good grades. Let’s face it - it is now a well-established truism that certain majors, which overwhelmingly tend to reside in HASS, assign far higher grades for far less work than do other majors.</p>
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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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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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>
<p>Uh, how is it ‘tangentially related’? The title of this thread is “Why do people say that engineering major is a ‘GPA killer’” which naturally implies a relative comparison of the GPA’s in engineering to some other major, almost certainly to HASS. After all, if every major utilized the exact same grade curve, then engineering would not have a reputation as a GPA killer and this thread would never have been born. </p>
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<p>Again, the ‘so what’ is that the differential in grading schemes serves as the entire rationale for this thread. Seems to me that you disagree with the entire premise of this thread. If so, then perhaps you should take it up with the OP. I didn’t create the thread.</p>
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<p>Which is merely a tautological statement and doesn’t speak to the concerns of the OP that engineering is a GPA killer. According to your logic, if everybody majoring in Leisure Studies received an A+ and everybody majoring in engineering received an F, then the OP is exactly right to think that engineering is indeed a GPA killer. </p>
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<p>Like I said, I didn’t start this thread. </p>
<p>But even if I had, so what? If you don’t like my posts, then don’t read them. What gives you the right to dictate what people can and cannot say on this forum? </p>
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<p>And now I see that you’re constraining yourself to only the subset of CS courses that implement a substantial element of design - not dissimilar to design-oriented seniog capstone engineering courses. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, such CS and (yes) math courses represent only a minority of the total undergraduate coursework. Much CS coursework is largely analogous to math coursework, to the point that schools such as MIT actually cross-list CS and math coursework together. Hence, such coursework can be discussed jointly. And the exam grading of those courses generally revolves around proofs (or implementations of 'best-performing ’ algorithms which are analogous to proofs). Unless you happen to be the rare genius who can devise proofs that nobody else had ever thought of, there is generally only one, or at most a handful of methods, to solve each exam question. If you don’t provide one of those methods (and hence, can’t complete the proofs at all), then you fail. </p>
<p>Don’t believe it? Then let’s consider the exams and quizzes of MIT’s ‘Introduction to Algorithms’ course, a foundational course within the CS major that is also cross-listed with math. I see little if any evidence of room for ‘creativity’ involved in devising the solutions to any of these questions. Certainly seems to me that there are no more than a tiny few ways to correctly answer each question, and if you don’t score sufficient points, then you fail. </p>