Really? Physics and Math were the weed-out classes for engineers who couldn’t hack it at my engineer mill. Sure, liberal arts and social sciences and management were safe harbor for failing engineers, but something like physics only promised more difficult classes, if less demanding project work.
When I was an undergrad (astronomy major, but it amounts to the same thing), we were required to take more credits each semester than liberal arts majors were allowed to take. And there was no stigma attached to taking an extra year to get your degree; we all would have if we could have afforded it.
There’s also the matter of specialization: Despite being close to getting my PhD, I can’t really tell you anything beyond the basics of anything in solid state physics, for instance. In earlier times, a physicist was expected to be able to do all of physics.
And another point that I don’t think anyone else has mentioned, technology has mooted a lot of techniques that physicists used to need to learn. It used to be that a lot of a grad student’s time was taken up just doing mindless calculations, which we can do on a computer now nigh-effortlessly.
I have a BSEE degree but my real (and unrequited) love is for physics. Before I started self studying physics I checked a lot of universities for their various curricula. As far as I’m concerned advanced physics is much harder to master, but, strangely, an undergraduate degree is significantly easier than an undergraduate degree in engineering.
I got my EE degree in four years, but I swear it almost killed me. No insult intended, but the non tech guys and physics guys seemed to have a hell of a lot more time to enjoy themselves than us poor EE grunts.
It got me a really great job but I basically lost four of the best years of my life. And I don’t think that would have been the case if I’d gone for an undergrad degree in either physics or a non-tech field.
Short answer.
The entry level fundamentals havent changed (besides a thing or three) in anywhere from 50 to a couple hundred years depending on the particular topic. Sure, the cutting edge geniuses have added a thing here or there or better explained WHY certain things are the way they are.
But again, the basics havent changed in a long time. The advanced stuff is IMO is more a bunch of very advanced and volumous math in conjunction with alot of specialization.
Chem 101 is Gen Chem, not Inorganic Chem.
It seems to me that, to a certain extent, the goal of the learning process has changed from having to memorize vast quantities of material to more of an emphasis on understanding things. I think that this is progress, but it once took a great deal of study to memorize all the things that students were once expected to know–without understanding how it all related because such understanding was still a work in progress.
Geology once consisted of little more than memorizing thousands of different minerals; only in recent decades has the theory of plate tectonics explained how the structure of rock changes over time.
Biology once consisted of little more than cataloging various species. Modern evolutionary theory has shown how all life is interconnected.
Chemistry once consisted of little more than memorizing the results of various combinations of reactants. Even first-year chemistry courses today cover atomic and molecular electron orbitals, and teach students why things react chemically the way that they do.
Undergraduates in the sciences also often spent time learning foreign languages (e.g. French and/or German) to assist in reading foreign science journals.
The big thing here is accreditation. It has been a long time so there may get some of this wrong, But. Most accreditation orgainzations have requirements before they will accredit a school. Most have a mim reqirement of 120 units for a BA or BS degree. There is a minimum number of general ed units. And other things. Then on top of the general accreditation there are specific accreditation such as engineering socities that may require more.
I graduated from the Calif Maritime Academy with a non accredited degree. At that time it was a three year program. But we had classes 12 months a year, on a tri-mester system. I graduated after 9 tri-mesters with I think it was around 165 units. The academy did not accept classes from another school. We were midshipmen, the proper name of someone learning to be a merchant marine officer. If Iremember right the only general ed class we took were 2 English classes, 1 Gov class, and I think that was it. Everything else was engineering related. The schools mission was "To prepare the students the US Coast Guard test as a third, to make the students eligible to recieve an Ensigns commission in the US Navy or Coast Guard, and to recieve a BS degree.
To be accredited the academy had to change their mission naming recieving a BS degree first. Drop some of the engineering classes and have more general ed classes. Stop calling their students Midshipmen and now they are cadets.
The bad side I worked with a 90’s graduate from the academy. His coment was that I had better training and knew the operation of machinery better.
I hear yea. Getting my BSEE was grueling. I truly believe a person must be somewhat masochistic to voluntarily endure four (or five in my case) years of undergrad electrical engineering. Strangely, graduate school wasn’t nearly as bad.
I just got my Bachelor’s in mechanical engineering and it only took me 6 years! Of course one of those years was due to a college transfer, but I really do think it’s extremely difficult to get an engineering degree (mechanical at least, since that’s what I’m familiar with) in just 4 years. The plans of study that I see always have students taking upwards of 17 credit hours a semester in order to finish in 4 years… Which is just barely doable, if you don’t plan on having a job or working any. It’s ridiculous.
I’ve often wondered why every major has 4 years considered the standard, especially when it’s so painfully obvious that there are some *vastly *easier majors out there. And nothing pisses me off more than when someone from a blow-off major tries to compare their GPA with mine (which was still pretty good at a 3.56, but I guarantee if I majored in some BS like tourism or physical education I could get a 4.0 too).
However, students still need to take a year or more of calculus etc. to meet the prerequisites for the more advanced courses.
When my cousin was getting her master’s degree in education, she would sometimes whine & complain about how difficult it was. I said to her, “I don’t know anything about the ‘science’ of education. But I bet, right now, I could take any class you’re taking, and get a B or A in it.” She agreed that that’s probably the case. But the converse is definitely *not *true; there is no way she could pass any MSEE class.
This won’t be a popular suggestion, especially among the old folks, but I think part of it is that students go to university having already learned things they previously would not have encountered until they got to university.
A lot of teachers, including my own mother, have remarked on the fact that the curricula in used today teach concepts a lot earlier than they used to.
Off topic, but I thought it was funny.
I recall a star trek, TNG episode, where some elementary school student is being dragged down the corridor by the dad, complaining the whole time that the calculus he is learning is something he will never have any use for 
Another thing that pisses me off: spending hours upon hours learning how to do stuff by hand when in industry, it’s all done in computers. Yes, I know the value of knowing the theory behind various things, but when 99% of class time is spent on the theory and 0-1% on applications, it quickly becomes apparent that that knowledge is going to be close to useless when you get a job. I just wish schools would spend more time focusing on working with the computer applications we’ll be working with once we start working, rather than focusing so heavily on formulas we’re unlikely to touch again.
Case in point: a graduate class I took on CAD/CAM applications required us to learn the various theories and equations that CAD programs use to draw curves and solids. Completely and utterly pointless unless you have (very specialized) intentions on eventually programming CAD/CAM programs. Do construction workers need to know the complete manufacturing process behind the hammer they’re using?
Since it’s unlikely the school will be using the same software that you’ll be using in industry just five years down the road, that would be a waste of time.
This is more apt for closed-source software or areas where there is no de facto standard: A CS student learning C will likely be able to use that language directly in any industry job involving OS design or embedded software, and if he uses gcc he’ll likely be able to use gcc in a large number of jobs.
This doesn’t have anything to do with learning theory, really, except that theory without practice is dry and difficult to master, whereas theory plus practice is very often intuitive.
When I was in university for the first couple of years (physics and then engineering) we were still required to do ordinary least squares fits by hand, showing the calculation, despite the fact that the primitive-but-functional spreadsheets and scientific calculators of the day could do this far more efficiently. I don’t believe I’ve done a least squares calculation by hand in two decades except as an example; and I doubt most students outside of a statistics class could repeat the method from memory. While this seems like kind of a loss of knowledge and dependence upon computers to do the thinking, the fact is you can teach a ten year old to do a OLSF, and it is hardly the sort of thing you’re going to need to do while dangling off a building, so like calculating involute curves, it is something that can be relegated to a reference.
:rolleyes: Although individual professors in the liberal arts may be very stringent (I had a symbolic logic class that was as difficult as any engineering class) it can be taken for granted that the curricula within the liberal arts is significantly less demanding than in the hard sciences and engineering, just as business curricula are easier than most of the liberal arts. There is a reason that most people prefer literature or anthropology over calculus and organic chemistry.
As others have noted, the information covered in a undergraduate physics degree is limited to providing a broad base from which to specialize and hardly cutting edge. An undergraduate physics student will take two or three semesters of “modern” physics (i.e. relativity and quantum mechanics) but it will be at essentially the same state as taught in 1950 with only some qualitative updates; no applications in those fields, such as they are, will be taught, and students aren’t required to perform literature searches or otherwise read up on the advanced researches in the field. The same is somewhat less true for engineering; owing to tools and technics that have changed dramatically, engineering students in most fields will be learning methods and using tools that are only a decade or so behind industry (and less, perhaps, in computer engineering or some of the biosciences) but the undergraduate level is still a survey, and the student is expected to learn more detail in an advanced degree program or out in industry.
I have a few British friends who are engineers, and their programs were slightly different, more in line with a five to six year combined BS/MS or MSE program with a thesis-like project. This is frankly probably a better approach to producing a practicing engineer but would obviously deviate from the BS/BA-in-four approach that is the de rigeur assumption in American collegiate education for a terminal degree. A restructuring of collegiate education would likely recast many easier programs in a two or three year spectrum while demanding five or six in technical degrees, but then it would make it even more difficult for engineering programs to recruit domestic students knowing that they would be taking twice as long to get a salable degree.
Stranger
Not for long. It’s expected to pass that from 2012 onward people will need an MS or an additional 30 hours of coursework (functionally an MS) to get their PE. This is for the US obviously and I believe that everybody else will be grandfathered in, but a BS is looked at as the absolute minimum and some people, like the faculty at the University of Illinois, consider an MS an entry level degree.
Some engineering bachelor’s degrees were five years for a while. The preface to one of my textbooks, written by a professor at Ohio State in 1972, talks about having to fit the course into “a general curricular reorganization required by a change in the College of Engineering from a five-year to a four-year program.”
Ah, I get it. Rolling one’s eyes and “tak[ing] things for granted” must be an example of the redoubtable rigor that engineers never, ever tire of constantly telling us about.
On a board supposedly dedicated to fighting ignorance, from a poster allegedly trained in the scientific method, this kind of cop-out is particularly embarrassing, no es verdad?