Reply to Engineering: Rigor, Grading, and GPAs

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This post is mostly intended for parents of current E School students or parents of HS students planning to go to E School.

Many Engineering schools do not have (much) grade inflation. Most E Schools grade each course on a curve. Often grades are curved to a 3.1 or 3.0 median grade, which means a fair number of students in a class will get a B- or C+.

Even those with lower GPAs will be able to get a good job after graduating with an engineering degree.

Parents ought not freak out if their E School kid does not have a top GPA. Parents should be supportive of all their college students, and a struggling E School student might need more support than some others.

[b]All ABET accredited E Schools will have similar coursework with similar rigor. [/b]Very top schools like MIT/CalTech do not bother with ABET, but obviously they also are rigorous. Afternoons often will be spent in graded labs.

All this rigor means the E School college experience often has both less free time and less flexible time than students in Arts & Letters will have. E School is a hard slog for virtually any student with Feynman being the exception who proved the rule. When I was in E School, I only took off Friday night and Saturday night (and Sunday morning for church). Otherwise, it was mostly eat, sleep, or academics.

Students planning to apply to E School should try to take rigorous math, physics, and chemistry classes in HS. Calculus is essential, but getting an A in Calc AB is probably better than a C in Calc BC. Students with no calculus likely will struggle if they even are admitted. [/quote]

Two engineers different schools and one family member whobhas taught at NC State and Cornell and others, has tenure at a different ivy. The rigor is no where near the same. Not close. At all.  Top schools get the brightest students and the professors can and do move fast and expect more. The curriculum of one semester physics was covered in the first half a semester at the top school, similar situation with calculus pacing. [/quote]
I think there is a difference, but maybe not as large as this statement.

I went to a lower ranked engineering school and, for calculus, we used the same text book, syllabus and practice tests as the department chair's mentor at MIT.  It was similar for physics and chemistry, etc.  The departments tried very hard to match the curriculum of top programs for all the core technical classes.  The difference was that my lower ranked school curved to a 2.6 so it was very, very hard to have a good GPA.    Often a 300 person class would only have a handful As given out.  I also suspect that the liberal arts requirements were significantly easier than they would have been at a top school.

I went on to a prestigious PhD program, as did my husband from the same undergrad, and we both found we were well prepared to keep up with those coming from top schools, but we were also in the couple of kids with excellent GPAs.[/quote]

I went to UIUC. There were basically different sequences in math. It all covered the same material, just at difference paces, but it was basically 5 classes worth of material. Most students passed out of the first class through AP or the placement test. Many passed out of the first two. Then it was up to you how fast you wanted to cover the rest of the material. You could take a 1 semester class that went through 3 classes worth of material in lightening speed. Or do it over 3 semesters. Or you didn't pass out of the first two classes in the sequence, you could do it in one semester, two or even three.

So the inner city or rural kid that never took Calc in high school could take a slower paced sequence and go to summer school to catch up to avoid doing 5 years. Or they could do it rapidly to catch up.

The kids that passed out on a the first two classes and then took an accelerated pace on the rest, could graduate early, take a semester off for an off-campus internship, study abroad (rare for engineering students at my school), or a co-op, do a major research project, or take very advanced graduate level classes their senior year. These were very ambitious kids. Many would go on to PhD programs at places like Purdue, Michigan, Georgia Tech, UIUC, Berkeley, Stanford and even MIT.

Anyways, that's how a really big school did things with people with varying levels of math skills. Even the easiest sequence for engineering wasn't easy, but if you were a grinder and dedicated, you could get through the math needed.

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