How crap does an admissions process have to be to admit a majority of students who are “incompetent”?
When I was as a GTA, there were some freshman/sophomore students performing badly. But it was usually because they were not handling the transition from home life to college life well. Partying too much, not disciplined, not sleeping, some had what we’d now call “executive function” challenges. I don’t think I met any who couldn’t do high school algebra.
And this was in the business administration school, not engineering. And not even a top 50 school. Certainly not even top 100 for business administration.
Are people saying the majority of engineering students are incompetent? Only a few are brilliant, and there are certainly some you do not want to see designing bridges, but the majority probably know some algebra.
The majority of students who join engineering departments are sufficiently incompetent that they shouldn’t become engineers. I don’t know if a majority are so incompetent that they can’t solve V = IR for a different variable, but some definitely are that incompetent.
How often, in your interactions with business majors, did you have occasion to even know their level of algebra competency? It won’t always come up with business majors. But it will always come up with engineers.
The classes I supported were Business Mathematics & Portfolio Theory. The vast majority of the material involved algebra, limits, series, proofs, some differential calculus.
Back in the day the only physics department course required for all engineering and science majors was the intro to physics course. This would have been taken freshman year. Half the incoming class would take it first semester, the other half second semester (flip-flopping with the required intro to chemistry course). The EEs who were going into semiconductors would take the intro quantum mechanics course, the others would take thermodynamics (not in the physics department).
Math department would provide three semesters of calculus for all engineering and science majors, plus differential equations and complex analysis for EEs. Most students would have taken some calculus in high school, but not at the AP level.
So if you were teaching physics to engineers, you would have been teaching some with little to no calculus and in their first year of college. True engineering courses wouldn’t start until sophomore year (when you would choose your field) with the “weeding out” course (circuit theory 1) second semester sophomore year.
Complicated by the fact that physics was considered the easier course so higher placed freshmen would get chemistry first.
We lost about 1/3 of the EE majors along the way (not including those who just couldn’t handle freshman year at all). Many of those we lost went to Industrial Engineering so still ended up as engineers.
Of those that survived, maybe half went into actual engineering careers and the rest into related fields (technical sales and marketing).
It all depends on what you define as “incompetent”. A student incompetent in math would never survive solving the systems of simultaneous equations from Kirchoff’s laws in the basic circuit theory course.
A few of the responses from 2013 mentioned chemistry, and I can confirm at least some chemists made it into decent PhD programs after having memorized their way through undergrad. This method didn’t work so well for them in grad school.
It’s common in fiction for rote memorization to be the standard way to show how smart someone is. Recalling a specific line from a book at random.
Such a useful skill in the IT age.
(I know this is tangenting but we’re over 80 posts in)
I’m reminded of Asimov’s story ‘sucker bait’ where people are dying on a new colony planet until a talented mnemonic happens to remember that beryllium (which is common on the planet) is toxic to humans.
It’s a nice science-based twist, though I can’t really credit that a technological space travelling civilization wouldn’t have that information readily available!
I have come across people that have got quite a distance through academic study partly based on a freakishly good memory. One even made it to a PhD program, but rather inevitably came unstuck.
The OP asked about “successfully studied” which does depend upon your definition of success. Passing the exams and getting a degree is one thing. Being able to create a successful career in the subject area is quite another.Very hard to imagine any career in the modern world that could work.
There are always cohorts of students that try to memorise everything in order to pass exams. Cramming for exams is a well trodden path. Where it gets annoying, from a teaching standpoint, is a tactic of study that is pushed in some groups. Basically learning keywords, and rote learning responses to these keywords. It is quite sad to see exam papers from students trying this. The tactic seems to be that even if the answer is wrong, it isn’t so wrong that it attracts no marks, and they might by simple volume of regurgitated stuff fall over the line.
And one gets students complaining about their marks on this basis.
The saddest is getting exam papers that include a perfect answer to last year’s question. Even if the question in the current exam is about a totally different topic.
Setting exams usually tries to provide a range of questions, from the basic checking for a pulse, to those that require significant understanding. In the face of rote learning students, even the basic questions need to be judged in such a way to require at least some basic thought processes. Lazy question setting, such as setting a tutorial question, or an example from lectures - even if slightly different - may get rote learnt answers that again, whilst not correct, are not entirely wrong either. Picking the gap between honest mistakes and pure rote learnt answers is not a trivial thing to do. Which eventually works to the advantage of the rote learner. So setting exams becomes a nuanced task.
I agree with you completely. I have absolutely no idea what @ftg is claiming. It’s complete bullshit.
At my state university, anyone could declare a pre-engineering major. The math department taught calculus for engineering (three quarters) the physics department had physics for engineering (also three quarters) and there were two quarter of first year chemistry classes not only for engineers but also biology and other pre-med. There was a separate calculus series for math majors and maybe something similar for physics and chemistry.
However, the various engineering programs only accepted a limited number of students. My EE program admitted 120 students, based on GPA for the pre engineering classes, and then cut off the bottom 10 after the second year.
Yes, there were some people who signed up for pre-engineering and got washed out shortly. It happens. But the professors giving the tests would have known that the overwhelming vast majority of students in their class would have been able to handle algebra. As you said, it’s intellectual snobbery and lazy thinking.
Yes, I believe so, although I’ve only watched a few episodes. One of the key characters is an ace at exams, and a great lawyer, both thanks to being able to recite from books from memory.