<p>
[quote]
In my experience, it's the students who actually try to understand the material who do worse because they end up confusing themselves.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>In some classes, understanding (rather than regurgitating) the material is critical to doing well in the class, because that is what is tested.</p>
<p>
[quote]
What percentage of the classes in your experience would you say had very little connection to real-world applications? It seems for you that it was every other class.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Probably around 33% or so. </p>
<p>
[quote]
I'm repeating myself in this thread a lot, mostly because I strongly disagree that it is the fault of professors and engineering curricula that a lot of students do so poorly in engineering. Well, let me clarify. Engineering is difficult, so that is a reason why students do so poorly, but I don't think universities make learning the material more difficult than it needs to be. Personally, I think that students' laziness (or just plain lack of interest in engineering) is more to blame.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Let me give you an example. My brother went to Caltech - the school with arguably the most technically adroit and grindingly hard-working student body in the country. Whatever adjectives you want to use to describe the Caltech student body, terms like "lazy" or "not interested in technical subjects" clearly do not apply. Nevertheless, a giant fraction of Caltech students - i.e. perhaps over half - who start engineering majors at Caltech won't actually complete them. Granted, some of them do so because they find other majors to be more interesting. But others cannot because it is just too hard. Caltech has a conspicuously low graduation rate considering the strength of its student body. Even those who do manage to get through the engineering program will often times only barely pass. </p>
<p>So think about what that means. Surely we can all agree that those Caltech engineering students who perform poorly would have almost certainly done fine at any other engineering program in the country. They just perform poorly at Caltech. I think that's a clear and striking case of a school that deliberately makes engineering too hard for many of its students. </p>
<p>Nor is Caltech the only example. Engineering at other top schools such as MIT, Berkeley, Cornell, and the like are also simply too hard for many of their students despite having highly qualified student bodies that could almost certainly have done fine in engineering programs at most other schools. </p>
<p>What kills you is the curve. Again, I got a 30% on my thermo exam...and celebrated. Why? Because the mean was a 25%. The exam was clearly "too hard" for me. But it was also clearly too hard for everybody else too. Even the very top scorer of that exam - who I think scored something in the 50's - admitted afterwords that he didn't really understood what was going on. Nobody knew what was going on. </p>
<p>Yet the curve meant that a certain fraction of the class was required to flunk, even though nobody in the class actually truly understood the material. Rather, what actually mattered was the "degrees of misunderstanding". To pass, I didn't have to actually understand what was happening (because nobody was able to do that). All I had to do was just misunderstand less than most other people misunderstood.</p>
<p>Just because a school grading is hard does not mean a student actuall understood the stuff that was taught. One of my boss graduated from Cal Tech, he must be at the bottom of the pile because he said he understood more stuff at UCLA where he got his master degree than at CalTech.</p>
<p>Columbia_Student has reinforced my point: schools have to find the level of difficulty that is appropriate to the students. Surely we can all agree that there is no point in teaching quantum physics to a bunch of kindergarteners. </p>
<p>That's not to say that you can't teach difficult material, for I do agree that learning difficult material does improve one's ability to think. But the material can't be so difficult that the students can't understand it at all. The weightlifting analogy is apt: you want to be able to lift a weight that is heavy enough that you struggle to complete a limited number of reps, but not so heavy that you can't even budge the darn thing.</p>
<p>Here's a heuristic. At my school (Uni of 30K+) I think they use these tactics simply because there are so many of us. No matter how you cut it, school is still a business. The product the graduating class and the customers the employers. There needs to be some diversity in the goods (read: grades) or the school looks too easy. Any method to differentiate bar "curving" and testing us on irrelevant material will result in most students graduating with very similarly high grades. How many engineering programs can actually afford for that to happen?</p>
<p>
[quote]
One of my boss graduated from Cal Tech, he must be at the bottom of the pile because he said he understood more stuff at UCLA where he got his master degree than at CalTech.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>...You are supposed to understand "more stuff" as a graduate student.</p>
<p>
[quote]
You are supposed to understand "more stuff" as a graduate student.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I don't think so. In my experience, it's just that grad students have become more comfortable with not understanding things the first time (or first few times) that they see them, and realize that if the concepts that they're not understanding are really important, they'll end up understanding them after a bit of studying or a bit more contextual basis. They've just learned not to be so stressed about it all.</p>
<p>
[quote]
You are supposed to understand "more stuff" as a graduate student.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Yeap, that is the key word.</p>
<p>I agree with the assessment that those who try and understand the material will get worse grades than those who don't. All my friends in college who had the high gpa's later taught me there ticks, which I used my senior year. My senior GPA was like a 3.7, while my graduating gpa was a 2.8.</p>
<p>The trick was simple. Dont care about the material, just go to class get a brief of it, and do practice problems. Do alot of practice problems with solutions guide, then take test and get good grade. Forget material and start over. </p>
<p>One can easily get through any Engineering curriculum with this mentality, wish I had known about it earlier.</p>
<p>
[quote]
The trick was simple. Dont care about the material, just go to class get a brief of it, and do practice problems. Do alot of practice problems with solutions guide, then take test and get good grade. Forget material and start over.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>That works for some classes, but not others. What do you do when you have exams that have questions that don't even remotely resemble practice problems from textbooks and from classes? I've had quite a few of those; to do well on those tests you have to be able to use your knowledge of the subject and apply it in a way that you haven't before. It all depends on the professor.</p>
<p>
[quote]
The trick was simple. Dont care about the material, just go to class get a brief of it, and do practice problems. Do alot of practice problems with solutions guide, then take test and get good grade. Forget material and start over. </p>
<p>One can easily get through any Engineering curriculum with this mentality, wish I had known about it earlier.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Wouldn't doing a lot practice problems help you gain understanding of the material? Perhaps the reason your GPA went up was because you started doing these problems? You know it is possible to actually care about and learn the material and still do well in class. </p>
<p>I understand that you're trying to say that by doing a lot of practice problems with the solutions available basically lets you memorize questions that you hope you will be on the test. But from my experience most professors realize this and tend to throw questions that cannot be solved simply by memorization of homework problems. My physics exams never matched work from the book or homework. </p>
<p>Like I said. People who care about the material AND do their work outside of class also receive good grades. What you say is true, it is possible to escape a class with a good grade and not truly grasp the material. But it also involves a lot of work to do so. Through that work you will most likely get some understanding in the end.</p>
<p>My point is that you can do lots of problems without the solutions and try and understand the material and doing so takes many many hours. Or you can get the solutions and just practice the problems for few hours before a test and get a 100 on it. My experience is that there are only so many questions a professor can ask, especially in math and science. My calc 2 teacher actually told us about this when i was a Freshman, and I should have listed to him. My phsyics classes were the same. In all of them physics 1-3, if you did enough problems and remembered basic algorithms you will get a A. </p>
<p>There are alot of classes that this doesn't work in, but the majority are like I explained below, which enables many to graduate and get A's in those classes and c's in the classes where they actually need to know and they even out to a B. </p>
<p>and yeah when you do a lot of problems you may actually start to learn it, but some will disagree. You may just be gaining experience and now have better recognition skills in a database you made in your head. Some college students and adults still cant read, instead they have created a massive database in there heads that allows them very quick and efficient seek and recognition abilities.</p>
<p>
[quote]
What do you do when you have exams that have questions that don't even remotely resemble practice problems from textbooks and from classes?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Yes, there's many different questions they can ask you, but only a few types of questions they can ask you. If you can manipulate the formulas and memorize the concepts, you do well. Knowing the formulas lets you answer the math questions and memorizing the concepts (which does not require actually understanding the concepts) lets you answer the concept questions. If you write a decent essay, you can "apply the concept" to the question as well.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Through that work you will most likely get some understanding in the end.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Depends on what you call understanding. Ability to apply it to many questions that use the same concept (i.e. many questions of the same type), yeah. Getting why it works, not so much.</p>
<p>
[quote]
You may just be gaining experience and now have better recognition skills in a database you made in your head.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Exactly. You know what to seek and how to find it/get it. Just "plug and chug".</p>
<p>
[quote]
Forget material and start over.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>When cumulatives come, just go back through some of your old notes, homework, etc, and you'll be fine. If you truly adhere to the Method, this process shouldn't take very long.</p>
<p>I know someone has posted this on the boad but here it is again some school can get the graduation rates % in engineering up.....almost 90% graduation rates. These schools must be doing something right "even though engineering is difficult".</p>
<p>The idea that you can do a lot of practice problems with a solutions manual and get good grades is highly subjective. This probably, greatly, depends on the school that you go to. I personally use this technique often, however, there have been numerous times where the material that I am tested on is completely different than any of the practice problems or even material that I have seen in class. Professors often make tests like this to seperate those truly gifted students who can use the concepts that have been learned and apply them in a completely different circumstance than what you have been taught and practiced, therefore, seperating the class. My physics classes have been like this to a great degree. No amount of practice problems would have prepared you for the questions unless you knew the questions ahead of time, they were not like any in the book. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that doing a great deal of practice problems may hinder you on these types of tests, this is because you learn to think about the problems in a certain manner when you must go about the problem differently in order to solve it correctly.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I personally use this technique often, however, there have been numerous times where the material that I am tested on is completely different than any of the practice problems or even material that I have seen in class.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>This was my experience as well. It was very frustrating, spending lots of time both going over the principles and doing practice problems, but only getting average grades. (At least it kept me from failing.)</p>
<p>
[quote]
Professors often make tests like this to seperate those truly gifted students who can use the concepts that have been learned and apply them in a completely different circumstance than what you have been taught and practiced, therefore, seperating the class.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I don't necessarily think there is anything wrong with this. However, I don't know to what extent this discourages people from studying engineering. It's not as if other fields such as medicine or finance don't have gifted professionals for whom certain things come more easily. Perhaps there needs to be a discussion of ways that a hard-working but not gifted student can make engineering contributions.</p>
<p>
The idea that you can do a lot of practice problems with a solutions manual and get good grades is highly subjective. This probably, greatly, depends on the school that you go to. I personally use this technique often, however, there have been numerous times where the material that I am tested on is completely different than any of the practice problems or even material that I have seen in class. Professors often make tests like this to seperate those truly gifted students who can use the concepts that have been learned and apply them in a completely different circumstance than what you have been taught and practiced, therefore, seperating the class. My physics classes have been like this to a great degree. No amount of practice problems would have prepared you for the questions unless you knew the questions ahead of time, they were not like any in the book. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that doing a great deal of practice problems may hinder you on these types of tests, this is because you learn to think about the problems in a certain manner when you must go about the problem differently in order to solve it correctly.
My physics class last semester was the same as yours, but doing practice problems never hurt my performance on tests. Sure, you're applying the concepts in a completely different way than in the problems, but you're still applying the same concepts and doing dozens of practice problems always helped cement those concepts in my head and taught me how to really apply them.</p>
<p>
[quote]
My physics class last semester was the same as yours, but doing practice problems never hurt my performance on tests. Sure, you're applying the concepts in a completely different way than in the problems, but you're still applying the same concepts and doing dozens of practice problems always helped cement those concepts in my head and taught me how to really apply them.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Oh sure, they help and are vital. However, they aren't substitution for reading the text or going to lecture, in my opinion. Both concepts and calculations are important.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Oh sure, they help and are vital. However, they aren't substitution for reading the text or going to lecture, in my opinion. Both concepts and calculations are important.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Well yeah, I didn't mean that you should just flip open your physics textbook to the exercises section and attempt to solve the problems based on intuition or discovering all the laws yourself. Reading the book and/or going to lecture are obviously needed to learn the concepts, but the practice problems are what really help you learn to apply them.</p>
<p>I am a high school student in India. I have been admitted to a few universities in the US. I am interested to do engineering. Can you please help me assess the difficulty level of Physics, Math and Chemistry in high school and first year of college?? I would be really glad if you could give a few sample questions in these subjects at this level. Do the SAT subject tests follow a standard level of difficulty? Or are the harder than what you guys do in high school...</p>