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In my time in school for Engineering (UIUC), I think the "gaming the system" was mostly with the group projects. Many high level classes such as processor desi
by cbanek 7y ago
In my time in school for Engineering (UIUC), I think the "gaming the system" was mostly with the group projects. Many high level classes such as processor design made people form into groups of 2, 3, or 4 people to do a project. Of course like most group work, the workload is terribly lopsided toward the competent people, while the less competent people go get pizza and drinks for the others, and take up a little bit of work (which usually has to get rewritten anyway). Everyone ends up with the same grade.
None of this is of course considered cheating, but a number of people skate past projects all the time. I do agree though, that once it gets to job interviews, those people typically fare less well.
Of course in engineering, some people would still try to focus on the easiest classes to fulfill the requirements and maximize their GPA, but GPA only seemed to really matter if you were going to grad school. Other than that, anything 3.0+ is good enough to get an interview for an internship.
- leetcrew 7y ago> Of course like most group work, the workload is terribly lopsided toward the competent people, while the less competent people go get pizza and drinks for the others, and take up a little bit of work (which usually has to get rewritten anyway). Everyone ends up with the same grade. I was never assigned a group project in college that I didn't feel was a complete waste of time, but this situation is actually pretty easy to avoid if the professor cares. one of my professors would require group members to individually submit reviews of their teammates with each milestone on the project. basically "did they do their fair share, less, or more?" if on average your team felt you went above and beyond the call of duty, your individual grade would be the group grade multiplied by r > 1, and the opposite if everyone felt you were a slacker. the scores were normalized so if everyone rated each other as exceptional, r would just be 1. it didn't make the distribution of work perfect, but it made everyone pretty interested in at least appearing to contribute.
- tnecniv 7y agoI agree with you mostly, but to add my own take: I've seen the cutoff for more desirable engineering jobs being 3.5, which is also basically the cutoff for competitive grad schools. The real distinguishing factor at that point is what kind of lab work / extracurricular projects you've produced, and it's a lot harder to hide behind a group then.