<p>That’s not supporting your point, BlueBayou. I haven’t done a comprehensive survey of the requirements across a representative sample of colleges, only observed the indicated condition in some course catalogs. AFAIK, it’s as DonnaL says, a common requirement.</p>
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<p>Interesting indeed. This brought to mind two anecdotes.</p>
<p>First, a friend who is a professor in a physical science department at a UC. A recent grad student in the department had an undergrad degree from a Cal State. My friend commented that though the student was hard-working, you could tell that the the student hadn’t been as well-prepared as other students in the program, who came from other UCs. </p>
<p>Someone mentioned up thread that more Cal State students are pre-professional, and are more likely to look at getting a job after undergrad rather than pursue grad school. I’m aware of at least one high prestige engineering employer in our area that has co-op and internship arrangements with several local Cal States. Cal Staters who take part in those programs are highly sought after by this employer. Not surprising, they’ve already proven their worth, they’ve been indoctrinated in the employer’s work culture. This employer does like to recruit at high-profile tech schools, so they draw from two different pots of recruits. </p>
<p>D1 never took any computer programming courses, but was lured into taking a Comp Sci class because the teacher has a great reputation. Not surprisingly, the class is a huge challenge for her, but she’s loving the rigor, loving the feeling when she “gets” it, and loving the camaraderie of the department. She’s been able to tap into a great deal of help and support from the professor, her TA, and upperclassmen in the department (who love helping because they find the freshmen’s mistakes hilarious 
). Perhaps a terrible analogy, but it’s like the Marines (“the few, the proud”), where you take great pride in being pushed to go beyond what you thought were your limits. It works for the military, for exercise classes, why not for an academic field?</p>
<p>Besides bad math, their upbringing does not include much “real-world problem solving”. In my generation, we took things apart and sometimes fixed them. We sewed, we cooked, we gardened, we made up games and rules, we wandered around by ourselves.</p>
<p>Very, very true.</p>
<p>I’ve also felt that our younger drivers don’t drive as well because they didn’t grow up riding their bikes to everything like we did. I firmly believe that bike-riding is a “pre-driving” skill. </p>
<p>*My Quote:
Do we really want to flood the country with STEM degrees that are worthless.</p>
<p>===============================</p>
<p>BlueB’s Quote: We do it with other liberal arts degrees…</p>
<p>so why is STEM different?
**
Why aren’t non-STEM majors graded as harshly as STEM majors?** *</p>
<p>Because…OMG I’m gonna get soooo flamed for this…it doesn’t often matter in the long run that non-STEMs have grade inflation. (ducking for the onslaught.)</p>
<p>I do not mean this reply to be a reply to everything that has been said, or all that I could say on the subject – just a few things that I didn’t notice being said before.</p>
<ul>
<li>Engineers really HAVE to get it right. There are objective standards and outcomes. I want my bridges, buildings, nuclear power plants, airplanes, and gizmos to function, not fall down and generally not kill me, poison me or pollute me.</li>
</ul>
<p>-Hard sciences are different from the liberal arts in their content – and in their degree of “truth” and in the methodology of testing knowledge about. The goal of most sciences is more to teach methods, technique and to ability to work the area to produce results than to teach content – of course one has to teach content in order to get to the higher levels of thinking. To learn to move forward, you have to use techniques correctly and get right answers – objectively right. And so on with scientific method (can’t do whole discourse here).</p>
<p>I am not dissing liberal arts, and at many good schools good scholarship is taught. But right answers and methods can be demanded from the beginning in stem, often students start liberal arts with very basic scholarship… their goal (which is a respectable one) is to learn about a subject, and papers are written to show they “understand” a subject, or they compare and contrast, or provide opinions, or persuade, or argue. All worthy, and it is important to write well, but much more subjective to grade, and – from someone who has done both – unlikely for someone with an evenly balanced in talents brain to find more taxing than a what a professor finds is an equal amount of problem sets.</p>
<p>–finally, for now, many go into stem because they have the intellectual talents to do so – but they know nothing of the culture and lifestyle. I was one of the top two most gifted math students in my HS, on the math team, taking all sorts of math enrichment yadda yadda, Westinghouse (I’m old), went to MIT to major in math. Leave aside the horrendous sexism. I wasn’t prepared for the solitary nature of math (not that there wasn’t also amazing collegiality as well). No more math TEAM, but hours of solving problems alone, being expected to break ground by thinking hard, and when results weren’t good enough, there were many disappointed fathers (professors who had taken me under their wing).</p>
<p>Silversas…</p>
<p>Exactly!</p>
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<p>Incidentally, this very subjectivity is one of the reasons most of my STEM major friends refused to consider majoring in humanities/SS fields or to take the more challenging intermediate/upper-level courses…especially at the elite LACs/universities. That…and heavy reading loads and writing lots of 5-15 page papers. </p>
<p>More interestingly, the vast majority of times when my STEM major friends/colleagues have said humanities/SS courses are “guts” or “Easy As”, it is because they’ve chosen an intro-level course or courses/fields well-known in the school for light reading assignments, easier multiple choice/short answer rather than rigorously graded essay exams, and little/no paper writing requirements (No 15-30 page research papers). I’ve also found they went out of their way to avoid taking the harder intro courses with Profs reputed to be heavily demanding/rigorous. </p>
<p>Incidentally, this behavior extends to some Harvard STEM major friends I knew who have/knew of fellow classmates who used the Harvard-MIT cross-registration agreement to take SS/humanities courses at MIT because they found them to be easier and less demanding than the ones on their own campus. </p>
<p>Conversely, I’ve also known of some MIT students who made a point to use that cross-registration agreements along with the one with Wellesley to take more challenging humanities/SS courses than what was available on their campus. Then again, this latter group tend to be much more like some LAC classmates who double-majored in STEM and a humanities/SS field and embraced each on its own terms.</p>
<p>Incidentally, this very subjectivity is one of the reasons most of my STEM major friends refused to consider majoring in humanities/SS fields or to take the more challenging intermediate/upper-level courses</p>
<p>This is very true. Many STEMs do not like a subjective “gray area” grading system. I think they also find it harder to elaborate - writing wise - and therefore would find it especially difficult to write pages and pages about something that they feel that they could express in a 5 para essay. </p>
<p>This is probably also why many STEMs don’t score that highly on the essay part of the SAT/ACT. Studies have shown that the more you write, the higher the score. Many STEMs don’t do well with the BS-factor. ;)</p>
<p>As a student in an accelerated doctorate-STEM program, I’ll provide my two cents as to why so many people change their minds regarding STEM majors. </p>
<p>(1) The material you study is significantly harder.</p>
<p>(2) The time you have to put in to learn it is significantly longer.</p>
<p>(3) The STEM student body is self-selecting, resulting in poor grades (curve).</p>
<p>(4) Your social life (“college experience”) suffers.</p>
<p>(5) You NEED research/work experience/extracurriculars to be competitive for graduate school because a B.S. is not enough (but you don’t have enough time to pursue these activities without letting your academics suffer to a degree).</p>
<p>(6) You have a high chance of ending up unemployed or in a dead end career without another degree.</p>
<p>Re post 26, imagine it. I’m raising my hand. Well, I wasn’t THAT bad, but I really didn’t care if my girls wanted into math/science. Boring.</p>
<p>Is the problem of grade deflation that of weeding out the non-starters–that is, flunking the kids who can’t do the work–or of taking undue pride in the rarity of As and Bs in the class? If you have a class full of kids, 60 percent of which are solidly competent students, 20 percent are merely competent, and 20 percent can’t cut it, and yet you hand out As and Bs to only 20 percent of the class, you are not “weeding out” the other 40 percent who are solidly competent–you are discouraging them from staying the course, especially if it’s an intro-level course, for which there might be quite varying degrees of preparation that affects performance more than simple aptitude. That is, success in an intro chem class might have more to do with the quality of one’s hs course; it might not be until the upper level course that students’ true aptitude is made clear. You won’t get to the upper level course if you are discouraged by the intro course from thinking you could be successful in STEM. And successful, most kids understand, is defined not by Cs and Ds, but by As and Bs. If a student takes an intro-level science course with a hundred students that’s nothing but lectures and tests and working like a mad thing just to pass, while his roommate takes a humanities course that features fascinating texts discussed in a class of 20, with a teacher who wants every student in the class to understand rather than to prove his stamina, no wonder if he drops out and takes humanities classes next term. Part of the point of the article was that STEM classes need to be made more hands-on, more positive, more engaging, not such a relentless grind that students decide they don’t want to live like this.</p>
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<p>From what I remember years ago (when there was less grade inflation generally), the typical lower division grade distributions were:</p>
<p>D/F - less than 10%, generally those who scored so low on tests that they deserved to fail
C - about half of the non-D/F grades
B - about two thirds of the grades higher than C, or about one third of the non-D/F grades
A - the rest, about one sixth of the non-D/F grades
(grades inclusive of +/- variations)</p>
<p>So about half of the non-failing students got A or B grades. Note the a C grade was supposed to indicate a reasonable passing grade where the student could continue on to the next course.</p>
<p>Of course, there has been grade inflation since then, so it would not be surprising if the proportion of A and B grades within the non-failing grades increased (indeed, an introductory EE course at Berkeley in 2003 had [more</a> A grades than any other grade](<a href=“http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ee40/fa03/]more”>UC Berkeley EECS40 Home Page)). But also, attitudes toward grades have changed. A C grade now seems to be viewed as failing, with a B grade viewed as a poor, but barely acceptable, performance, even among those who are not seeking medical school or top 14 law school.</p>
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<p>A large part of that is due to the even more rampant grade inflation in many mainstream US high schools and the corresponding lack of rigor as a result of students and increasingly parents who complain about teachers who grade “too harshly”. </p>
<p>It is a way of thinking that seems to be more prevalent within the last 20 years…even as most old-school Profs I’ve known have said most current college freshmen…even ones at the most elite schools are just as…or even more un/underprepared for college-level work than previous generations. </p>
<p>Maybe the prevalence of students who feel a 4.0+ GPA is inadequate for elite colleges when back in my high school days(early '90s)…4.0+ GPAs were almost unheard of by most of us.</p>
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<p>I don’t think that’s all that recent a phenomenon.</p>
<p>My Dad retired from college teaching (history) in 1981, after a career of 36 years, the last 32 at the same college, an eastern LAC. For at least the last 10 years of his career, I listened to him talk about how his students simply weren’t as prepared as those he had taught earlier - in terms of a solid high school history background, ability to think and write clearly, understanding of how to write a paper, etc.</p>
<p>He also experienced declining enrollments in his classes. Earlier in his career, his sections were always over-subscribed, because he was regarded as one of the better teachers at the school. As the years went on, he found fewer and fewer non-majors signing up for his classes - because (he said) he refused to ease up on grading standards, whereas his younger colleagues graded much easier.</p>
<p>And that was 30 years ago.</p>
<p>In our state, students with at least a 3.0 GPA and an 1100 on the SAT (24 ACT) get a $5,000 a year scholarship if they stay in state. In order to keep the scholarship a student must maintain a 3.0 GPA in college. * 60% of those who earn this scholarship lose it after freshman year *. These are suppose to be the best and the brightest. I would say there is a major problem with lack of rigor in my state’s public high schools. Really wish they would come up with some national educational standards. Even within a school district, you can’t count on the fact that the curriculum is equally as challenging or complete.</p>
<p>^ That statistic doesn’t surprise me. College is supposed to be more rigorous than high school, and a student whose GPA was in the low-3s in high school is going to have to work very hard to keep the college GPA above 3.</p>
<p>Perhaps others have had different experiences, but when we have had friends who graduated from elite schools thirty years ago or so (and gone on to careers in STEM fields) take a look at the texts that Frazzled kids have been expected to master in their gen chem classes (a level of text standard for elite schools and the most competitive state school honors programs), they have remarked that back in their day, that level of text was given to only the best-prepared students, while the bulk of incoming freshmen (many of whom also continued on to medical school or careers in science) were given far easier material. </p>
<p>Our friends have also remarked that thirty years ago, students aspiring to graduate school in STEM fields also had little pressure to work in labs beginning in freshman and sophomore year in order to be able to prepare a competitive senior project and present a viable application.</p>
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<p>[CONVERSABLE</a> ECONOMIST: Grade Inflation and Choice of Major](<a href=“http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2011/11/grade-inflation-and-choice-of-major.html]CONVERSABLE”>CONVERSABLE ECONOMIST: Grade Inflation and Choice of Major)</p>
<p>I think the solution is better preparation in HS. While many pan AP courses, there is a certain level of hand holding in these courses that is absent in college and for many it’s just the ticket to get a decent look at the material before taking it for real in college. </p>
<p>As I said before, I think AP Physics B is an excellent precursor to engineering. </p>
<p>How many chemistry students get weeded out of College Chemistry after doing well in AP Chemistry. </p>
<p>The humility and hard work required needs to start before college so there is not so much of a shock.</p>
<p>“Things ain’t what they used to be, and what’s more, they never were.” (Bassist for The Weavers in Wasn’t That a Time.)</p>
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<p>exactly correct. Better preparation in HS would allow students to be prepared for the level of work that they will be experiencing in college STEM programs.</p>