How do some people graduate from college without understanding the fundamentals of their major?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Case #1:

Last May I was interviewing people for an electrical engineering position at our lab. I came up with what I thought was an easy written test for each of them to take. It consisted of three questions. The first was to solve for the current through a resistor (that’s connected to a battery) using Ohm’s Law. The second was very similar, but consisted of two resistors in series with a voltage source. The third was essentially an algebra problem, and they had to solve for a variable.

One of the interviewees had a BS and MS in electrical engineering, and was about to graduate with a PhD in electrical engineering. He seemed very bright and knowledgeable when we spoke with him. I gave him the test. He got the first problem correct. Here is what he did on the second problem:

As can be seen, he thinks the current in the top wire is different than the current in the bottom wire. Did I mention he was about to graduate with a PhD in electrical engineering?

Here is what he did on the third problem:

This really isn’t an electrical engineering problem. It’s really just an algebra problem, where the interviewee must solve for a variable. It looks like he didn’t even attempt it.

Case #2:

We hired someone a few years ago. Lets call him Mike. He has a BS in electrical engineering, and is currently getting his MS in it. I am not his immediate supervisor and have not worked with him much. But he doesn’t seem like he knows anything based on my limited interactions with him. (And because he can’t do anything, he doesn’t do anything - he sits around and talks all day.) Another coworker, let’s call him Bob, has been tasked with mentoring Mike. Bob asked Mike to go in the lab and measure the capacitance between two metal plates that are separated by air. Each plate has a radius of 3 inches, and the plates are 3 inches apart. Bob also told Mike to calculate the theoretical capacitance. It’s a simple equation: C = e0*A/d, where e0 is the permittivity of a vacuum (8.8541878188E-12 F/m), A is the area of each plate, and d is the distance between the plates. (To be even more accurate, you could also multiply the answer by 1.0006 take into account that it’s air and not a vacuum.) This is what Mike sent to Bob:

His formula is correct, but he plugged in inches for the dimensions. He’s mixing meters with inches! How do you get through engineering school without knowing all of the “like” units in a formula must match? Just… how? And then he screws up the permittivity number twice: by first omitting the second most significant digit, and then turning a 10^-12 to a 10^12. And then he ignored the red flag: the answer was in trillions farads, and not trillionths of a farad.

Now, I don’t want to sound holier-than-thou here; I’ve made plenty of mistakes at my workplace. But these just seem so basic that I have to wonder what’s going on at these colleges.

2

I mean would be expected to do anything like that during an electrical engineering PhD? I would imagine not? You would be focusing on some specific advanced aspect of electrical engineering that would no more involve working out how current flows through a circuit than using the software on a computer would require knowing that.

So I’d imagine an electrical engineering PhD graduate would not have done anything like that since the early days of undergraduate.

Of course if you are applying for a job that will involve that stuff maybe revise a little, but revising a little probably isn’t gonna stop you making mistakes like that IMO

3

That would be my question: are those fundamentals something that a person would continue to use throughout their more advanced coursework and research? (This is a question for the OP or anyone else with a degree in EE or a related field. For what it’s worth, I tried the third (algebra) problem and at first got 693, or 1000 ln(2), before I noticed the units on C.)

4

I agree with the responses. What is this person doing his PhD on? I can think of quite a few topics where the problems in the test would not have been looked at in a very long time.
When I graduated I probably would have flunked a Fortran test, not having used it in seven or eight years and then very little.
When I was at Bell Labs we were not allowed to give tests like this to candidates, and I think this shows why.

5

Oh man is this ever out of my domain. But yeah, if, on the basis of any credentials that are supposed to mean anything you claim to know what you’re doing, but you can’t do basic shit, it casts the credentials into question.

I wouldn’t know Ohm’s law implementations and how to fix electrical circuits and would flunk a test on same if I didn’t study pretty hard. But we just had the telephone service folks to our house. All our landline phones make sound like phone is off the hook but none of them are. EverythingISP arrives, I show them in, point them to the modem that handles telephony. Show them the phones attached to our phone service, including the 1958-vintage Bell Telephone rotary black tel in the basement connected via four-prong adapter to the modern aka 1980s-vintage wiring. Show them the answering machine. Demonstrate the busy signal coming out when I lift a receiver.

Techs claim it’s wiring in the house gone bad; at least it’s not their equipment and not their responsibility, signal is coming in. But if we connect a telephone directly to the router, it works. “So fix your wiring or buy a wireless setup.”

Day later, I’m trying to connect up the answering machine to the circuit directly off the router. I put it inline with telephone daisy-chained to it. Make call from telephone. Works fine, except it won’t let me hang up. Further experimentation shows if answering machine is in the circuit, an active call can’t be hung up on, hence resulting busy signal, but take it out and everything else works. Including the relic rotary phone in the basement.

It’s specialization, and “do it by the script”, and paucity of people who get trained / acknowledged as expert beyond the script level. So nobody knows WTF they’re talking about.

6

I dunno. Sometimes people freeze up or choke in a stressful situation like an interview, but I don’t think that fully explains it. I’ve interviewed MANY software engineering candidates who had appropriate degrees and reasonable looking resumes, but when I asked them to do a simple programming exercise during the interview, they performed abysmally. One theory is, it’s possible to get through college by cheating on exams.

7

To be fair, every time I’ve had phone or cable or internet or other utility people try to solve a problem, they have initially blamed either my equipment or something else that would get them off the hook. It always requires persistence to get them to deal with the problem.

For the OP, there’s a proverb, “Ds get degrees” (at some schools it’s “Cs get degrees”). But even better students often study for tests by putting things into short-term memory, and especially if they’ve learned it without really understanding it, it doesn’t stick.

8

Lol - my nurse friend’s instructor told the class that “C equals RN”.

9

No, there’s no excuse for forgetting fundamentals. It would be like a physicist forgetting about gravity!

But, you would likely remember that it would be a bad choice to implement a GUI.

Employment tests should fall into two categories:

  • familiarity with the skillset(s) required for the job (you don’t need to demonstrate expertise but you should be able to demonstrate a basic understanding)
  • ability (and approach) to analyze a “fresh” problem

A hired employee who doesn’t have a grasp of the material will likely be ineffective. He’s the type who wouldn’t have a “deep toolbox” to draw on.

And, one who can’t analyze a problem he’s never seen before will likely have very limited use (glorified technician).

When I quiz candidates, I pay attention to their actions on hearing the questions posed. Do they ask GOOD questions in an effort to clarify/constrain the solution space? Or, do they just start writing code, drawing a schematic, etc.

10

The answering machine’s impedance (by itself or when combined with the other possibly imperfect loads) is too low for the telco to sense the “open circuit” that signals “all phones on hook”. Have you had any electrical storms (lightning strikes) “nearby” (which could be miles away given how lightning travels)? There’s often a protection network in the device that sits across the phone line; if toasted/compromised, you can see such behavior.

The technician should have:

  • unplugged your “house” from the network to verify THEIR wiring (to the house) is intact
  • plugged each device, one at a time, into their network to verify proper operation and identify which cause the problem to manifest

I put in a complaint about poor line quality when we had POTS. Our services are below grade so water infiltration is a real possibility (40 year old wiring).

Tech came out and put an analyzer on the line. I sat outside and chatted with him (he was in no great hurry to finish). After about 15 minutes of “clean line”, the noise floor suddenly went through the roof – “Whoa! What’s that??”

11

It can happen if all your classes are rather vague.

I completed an MBA last year. I still feel like I hardly know a thing about business, though. For instance, we took a class on “cross-cultural management,” and all it boiled down to was “don’t be a racist, sexist or Islamophobe;” the sort of thing any high schooler could ace a quiz on.

12

That’s not the case with enginering disciplines. It would be like a mathematician never dealing with NUMBERS!

13

It’s certainly possible to forget some things, if your recent course work hasn’t touched on it…but that first example is not something that anyone in an electrical field should forget. It’s not some highly technical or obscure thing–forgetting that the current will be the same in two segments of the same wire is like a plumber pouring a gallon of water into a straight piece of pipe and expecting only half a gallon to come out the other end. It would actually be better if they got both a) and b) wrong, as long as they gave the same answer for both.

These errors don’t represent people forgetting details. They represent people not actually thinking about the problem.

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im told the same way a lot of people graduate HS without knowing much except there’s the onus that people are paying for it, especially in all these “trade schools” that pop up )you know the ones that advertise on daytime tv and off brand cable channels )and newspapers )that will bend over backward to make sure they pass because if they don’t get certain grades they don’t get the grants/loans the school needs …

15

I am not an electrical engineer, but my degree involved one or two classes where the basics were taught, and that was a good 14+ years ago. I haven’t touched it since. I’m not entirely sure I could have solved those examples, but I actually think I would have come close.

I’ve dealt with PhD graduates who, for the life of them, couldn’t understand that they 1. Had to calibrate a pH meter regularly and 2. How to follow the literal step by step instructions on how to do it. They would just use it and not care, as apparently correct usage was below them.

I also had to deal with a “senior mechanical design engineer” who argued passionately that the “left hand side” of an airplane changed depending on which way you were facing. He could not understand the difference between left, in a coordinate system, and his personal left. I asked him whether forward and aft changed too, but those, at least, were immutable for him. This is a man who, on a drawing package with three drawings, wrote his own name incorrectly in three different ways. Zero attention to detail.

He also once did an entire drawing package for a lavatory modification based on a structural drawing for a lavatory that wasn’t even part of the plane in question. He apparently searched a key word in the database, picked a random-ass drawing he liked, and ran with it, nevermind that the plane in question was too small to even have a “forward lavatory”.

I hated that man.

16

Exactly. Or a PhD physicist who doesn’t understand forces on an object are additive, or doesn’t understand F = ma.

I can’t agree with the apologists here. There’s no excuse for an EE PhD grad to not know the two wires have the same current. It’s egregious, IMO. Would you also give him a pass if he didn’t understand the difference between voltage and current?

17

I’m trying to think of a chemistry equivalent to the OP but I know there have been high school chemistry questions here and elsewhere I don’t remember how to approach. They’re so removed from what chemists actually do.

I have several PhD EEs working for me and as long as they’re keeping the clients happy (they are), I don’t really care if they remember something from high school.

18

Yes, I have to come down on the side of Do Not Hire, unfortunately.

But the question was, “How?” Perhaps a large portion of this has to do with one’s attitude; I remember meeting someone who impressed me with his egregiously stubborn insistence on understanding everything properly. If there was something he needed to know or was just curious about, he would crack open a textbook and go through it, as well as ask questions— and he was resistant to handwaving explanations as well as bullshit— until he grokked it.

I can certainly understand not quite remembering precisely how to solve something, but a professional can figure it out. (Ideally also figure out how to solve problems previously unseen!) and would not output nonsensical answers in any case.

19

Someone botching the arithmetic in a calculation, or typoing a number, can be forgiven. I can even buy someone forgetting to do a unit conversion. But “the current is the same everywhere in a series circuit” is about the most fundamental thing there is about circuits. If you don’t know that, then you know absolutely nothing about electrical engineering. Even if there are some things that you seem to know, your context for those things is so wrong that you can’t actually be said to know them, either.

20

Many of you have been discussing highly technical fields, but a firm grasp of the basics should hold true for other areas of study as well.

I have first-hand experience with observing college students with the eyes of an adult. I returned to college in my 40s in order to complete my B.A, which I had not done when I was a kid. (I went to community college, got a job and never went further.) I observed many students, Seniors, who ended-up with a degree but who I thought would never get a job in their chosen field. They were simply drifting through the system, doing mediocre work and barely passing. They may as well been flushing Mom and Dad’s money down the toilet.

Worse yet, I had some professors who had no real-world experience in the classes they were teaching, or if they had, it was decades ago, and a lot had changed since, making what they were teaching irrelevant. And these were people with Masters and Doctorates who went from college right into teaching with no practical job experience in between.

People with no working knowledge teaching students who didn’t care. Sad.