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I think we need to be a lot more thoughtful about supporting university students through engineering programs. As a student I saw so many classmates crumple und

I think we need to be a lot more thoughtful about supporting university students through engineering programs. As a student I saw so many classmates crumple under the academic stress of weed out classes. Big engineering schools do a horrible job of supporting and cultivating the emotional lives of their students. 50% of students dropping out of engineering from freshman -> sophomore year is not normal.

dpeck 5y ago
There’s a trade off there though. I want the classes to be incredibly rigorous, and that means that there should be some amount of students who do not want to or cannot do it. And that’s ok, but we shouldn’t expect just because the admissions office let someone into a program that they’re qualified to build bridges after spending 4-5 years on a campus. It shouldn’t be emotionally abusive or anything like that, but I personally want to know that engineers have been put through some serious training so that the buildings I’m in stay standing, the water I’m drinking stays clean, and the electricity that I depend on for all but the barest of life’s essentials keeps flowing. What we need to do is normalize failure being acceptable, and encourage trying. To lean on a sports analogy: Not every kid who plays little league baseball is going to play for their high school team, not every high school player gets a shot in the minors, not every minor leaguer gets into the pros, not every pro is an all star, not every all star is the MVP. And all those are ok, sometimes physical and mental limitations come into play, and sometimes people just decide they’re not interested in pursuing something anymore due to the trade offs required for the next level.
- mips_avatar 5y ago
  I think it's great to have challenging courses where students have the opportunity to prove themselves. But when a student is having a physical/mental health crisis there shouldn't be a 6 month wait to get counseling services. I know plenty of dropouts who would be great engineers today if someone had cared when they were struggling.
  - Teever 5y ago
    There is something very wrong eith the expectation/situation where an academic institution is providing mental health support to students.
    - mips_avatar 5y ago
      Students should have some advisor at the university that cares about them, that they meet with regularly. In the absence of that mental health counselors do help, but only if they are accessible to students who need them.
    - eli_gottlieb 5y ago
      There's something more wrong with the situation where an academic institution routinely, reliably induces mental-health problems in a double-digit fraction of students.
    - Wiseacre 5y ago
      Shouldn't you be more worried about why the academic institution is causing these mental health issues?
- davesque 5y ago
  I think the issue is not with the challenge but with the format. It's fine if a course is challenging. But if you're stuck in a 500 person class where no one gives a shit about you or knows your name, and you just came from a typical high school where the average class size is relatively small, it can come as quite a shock.
- michaelbrave 5y ago
  Is the purpose of education just to be a filtration mechanism or does learning and growth happen? I'm reminded of Harvey Mudd's(1) success in creating a Comp Sci program with good gender ratios. They found the main reason women were dropping out of or not trying comp sci was due to intimidation factors, or to simplify grouping experts with beginners in the same classes made the beginners feel inadequate and quit. The solution they came up with was to split the classes based on computer experience levels and let the experts take a fast track class. I believe engineers or any medical professions could benefit similarly, instead of merely weeding people out with difficulty(which mostly translates to familiarity or previous experience)we could instead let those already familiar fast track it and those less familiar become familiar to the point of competence. It could benefit everyone really. 1. https://www.inc.com/kimberly-weisul/how-harvey-mudd-college-achieved-gender-parity-computer-science-engineering-physics.html https://www.inc.com/kimberly-weisul/how-harvey-mudd-college-...
- ianai 5y ago
  I think weeder courses aren't really about teaching rigor. If you want someone to know something rigorously then have them study it for 2-3 semesters or something like that. And give them lots of chances to practice the various skills. Like my math professors said, if you know how to do something one way then that's ok - maybe you have some idea of what's going on with it. But if you know how to do something two ways, then you definitely have a better idea than just knowing one way to do it. The more ways you can approach the same problem and come up with a solution the deeper your understanding. Weeder courses are more like an obstacle course or the (perhaps: literal) obstacles in the collegiate course. Lab techs that give you slightly wrong ingredients or technically the right ingredients if you knew some trick. Math problems that require some trick to prove or otherwise shoot you down 8-12 hours of grind with no solution. Or just giving the student a large matrix to calculate the determinate of without a calculator. Or marking -10% (out of 100%) for each, individual grammar mistake.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >Weeder courses are more like an obstacle course or the (perhaps: literal) obstacles in the collegiate course. Lab techs that give you slightly wrong ingredients or technically the right ingredients if you knew some trick. Math problems that require some trick to prove or otherwise shoot you down 8-12 hours of grind with no solution. Or just giving the student a large matrix to calculate the determinate of without a calculator. Or marking -10% (out of 100%) for each, individual grammar mistake. The conditions you described sound closer to "unfair" than just "weeder". I've heard of people describe certain courses as "weeder", but that's because they covered difficult material and had difficult assignments, not because the teachers were actively sabotaging the students.
    - eli_gottlieb 5y ago
      IME, a "weeder" course (public universities, CS department) has: * Large lecture sizes, often with professors who cannot teach or don't care to * Little student-professor engagement * Large discussion sections with TA's who can't teach either * Usually focused on calculation over rigor or depth. Usually no proofs, actual reasoning behind things hand-waved away, focus is on memorization. * Large homework loads * Large test loads or particularly high-stakes exams * De facto pass requirements drastically different from the actual grading scheme used in the course (eg: requiring an 80-90% grade to stay in the major in a course where the professor expects the average exam grade to be 40-50%). This often leads to curving the grades arbitrarily to get the cohort size the department actually wants.
avgDev 5y ago
I finished my CS degree 4 years ago at a state school with an average program. I formed a close relationship with one of the professors and we talked many times how there is pressure from the top to make things easier, to get better graduation rates. Programming requires a certain individual that likes solving problems and learning. Not everyone is made to program. Currently, software engineers in US are some of the best paid individuals with just a bachelors degree. Frankly, if you are intelligent, can code, and learn math on your own you don't even need one. That kind of money drives more students towards CS programs. In my programming 101 70% of students did not even attend the final. Then, next programming class was a better with high percentage of students passing. Eventually, when we got to class like theory of computation 80% of people failed to finish. I met a guy who graduated after trying to obtain his BS in CS for 7 years. He still is not employed in the tech field.
- mips_avatar 5y ago
  The purpose of a college degree (even an applied one like computer science) is not to teach students how to be good tech workers. It's to develop as a person and generate a philosophy on work and life that can guide them through the career and life challenges ahead. I think your professor is perhaps missing the point if he thinks it's about making classes easier/harder.
  - ralph84 5y ago
    Who decides what the purpose of a degree is? Certainly for the majority of people paying six figures the purpose is to be able to earn a return on that investment from employment. Figuring out a philosophy on life can be done at a much lower cost elsewhere. In fact college life is so unlike non-college life it's unlikely to be very useful for that purpose anyway.
    - mips_avatar 5y ago
      In university you’re paying for a bunch of esteemed professors to do something. What do you think they should do? I would want to get something a little more valuable than some calculus homework sets.
eli_gottlieb 5y ago
>50% of students dropping out of engineering from freshman -> sophomore year is not normal. Of course it's normal. It's the "normal" that society chose. It's just only sustainable during an indefinite glut of applicants, which lets everyone pretend that the problems in our pedagogical methods are the kids' fault.
opportune 5y ago
We’ve basically continually eroded hard standards going into higher education and going out of it in many cases. Might as well continue it and keep promoting students out of university classes they don’t do well in too
- mips_avatar 5y ago
  I think academic rigor is alive and well in the tech industry. Just look at coding interviews "aka questions from upper level algorithms courses".

dpeck 5y ago

There’s a trade off there though. I want the classes to be incredibly rigorous, and that means that there should be some amount of students who do not want to or cannot do it. And that’s ok, but we shouldn’t expect just because the admissions office let someone into a program that they’re qualified to build bridges after spending 4-5 years on a campus. It shouldn’t be emotionally abusive or anything like that, but I personally want to know that engineers have been put through some serious training so that the buildings I’m in stay standing, the water I’m drinking stays clean, and the electricity that I depend on for all but the barest of life’s essentials keeps flowing. What we need to do is normalize failure being acceptable, and encourage trying. To lean on a sports analogy: Not every kid who plays little league baseball is going to play for their high school team, not every high school player gets a shot in the minors, not every minor leaguer gets into the pros, not every pro is an all star, not every all star is the MVP. And all those are ok, sometimes physical and mental limitations come into play, and sometimes people just decide they’re not interested in pursuing something anymore due to the trade offs required for the next level.

mips_avatar 5y ago
I think it's great to have challenging courses where students have the opportunity to prove themselves. But when a student is having a physical/mental health crisis there shouldn't be a 6 month wait to get counseling services. I know plenty of dropouts who would be great engineers today if someone had cared when they were struggling.
- Teever 5y ago
  There is something very wrong eith the expectation/situation where an academic institution is providing mental health support to students.
  - mips_avatar 5y ago
    Students should have some advisor at the university that cares about them, that they meet with regularly. In the absence of that mental health counselors do help, but only if they are accessible to students who need them.
  - eli_gottlieb 5y ago
    There's something more wrong with the situation where an academic institution routinely, reliably induces mental-health problems in a double-digit fraction of students.
  - Wiseacre 5y ago
    Shouldn't you be more worried about why the academic institution is causing these mental health issues?
davesque 5y ago
I think the issue is not with the challenge but with the format. It's fine if a course is challenging. But if you're stuck in a 500 person class where no one gives a shit about you or knows your name, and you just came from a typical high school where the average class size is relatively small, it can come as quite a shock.
michaelbrave 5y ago
Is the purpose of education just to be a filtration mechanism or does learning and growth happen? I'm reminded of Harvey Mudd's(1) success in creating a Comp Sci program with good gender ratios. They found the main reason women were dropping out of or not trying comp sci was due to intimidation factors, or to simplify grouping experts with beginners in the same classes made the beginners feel inadequate and quit. The solution they came up with was to split the classes based on computer experience levels and let the experts take a fast track class. I believe engineers or any medical professions could benefit similarly, instead of merely weeding people out with difficulty(which mostly translates to familiarity or previous experience)we could instead let those already familiar fast track it and those less familiar become familiar to the point of competence. It could benefit everyone really. 1. https://www.inc.com/kimberly-weisul/how-harvey-mudd-college-achieved-gender-parity-computer-science-engineering-physics.html https://www.inc.com/kimberly-weisul/how-harvey-mudd-college-...
ianai 5y ago
I think weeder courses aren't really about teaching rigor. If you want someone to know something rigorously then have them study it for 2-3 semesters or something like that. And give them lots of chances to practice the various skills. Like my math professors said, if you know how to do something one way then that's ok - maybe you have some idea of what's going on with it. But if you know how to do something two ways, then you definitely have a better idea than just knowing one way to do it. The more ways you can approach the same problem and come up with a solution the deeper your understanding. Weeder courses are more like an obstacle course or the (perhaps: literal) obstacles in the collegiate course. Lab techs that give you slightly wrong ingredients or technically the right ingredients if you knew some trick. Math problems that require some trick to prove or otherwise shoot you down 8-12 hours of grind with no solution. Or just giving the student a large matrix to calculate the determinate of without a calculator. Or marking -10% (out of 100%) for each, individual grammar mistake.
- gruez 5y ago
  >Weeder courses are more like an obstacle course or the (perhaps: literal) obstacles in the collegiate course. Lab techs that give you slightly wrong ingredients or technically the right ingredients if you knew some trick. Math problems that require some trick to prove or otherwise shoot you down 8-12 hours of grind with no solution. Or just giving the student a large matrix to calculate the determinate of without a calculator. Or marking -10% (out of 100%) for each, individual grammar mistake. The conditions you described sound closer to "unfair" than just "weeder". I've heard of people describe certain courses as "weeder", but that's because they covered difficult material and had difficult assignments, not because the teachers were actively sabotaging the students.
  - eli_gottlieb 5y ago
    IME, a "weeder" course (public universities, CS department) has: * Large lecture sizes, often with professors who cannot teach or don't care to * Little student-professor engagement * Large discussion sections with TA's who can't teach either * Usually focused on calculation over rigor or depth. Usually no proofs, actual reasoning behind things hand-waved away, focus is on memorization. * Large homework loads * Large test loads or particularly high-stakes exams * De facto pass requirements drastically different from the actual grading scheme used in the course (eg: requiring an 80-90% grade to stay in the major in a course where the professor expects the average exam grade to be 40-50%). This often leads to curving the grades arbitrarily to get the cohort size the department actually wants.

avgDev 5y ago

I finished my CS degree 4 years ago at a state school with an average program. I formed a close relationship with one of the professors and we talked many times how there is pressure from the top to make things easier, to get better graduation rates. Programming requires a certain individual that likes solving problems and learning. Not everyone is made to program. Currently, software engineers in US are some of the best paid individuals with just a bachelors degree. Frankly, if you are intelligent, can code, and learn math on your own you don't even need one. That kind of money drives more students towards CS programs. In my programming 101 70% of students did not even attend the final. Then, next programming class was a better with high percentage of students passing. Eventually, when we got to class like theory of computation 80% of people failed to finish. I met a guy who graduated after trying to obtain his BS in CS for 7 years. He still is not employed in the tech field.

mips_avatar 5y ago
The purpose of a college degree (even an applied one like computer science) is not to teach students how to be good tech workers. It's to develop as a person and generate a philosophy on work and life that can guide them through the career and life challenges ahead. I think your professor is perhaps missing the point if he thinks it's about making classes easier/harder.
- ralph84 5y ago
  Who decides what the purpose of a degree is? Certainly for the majority of people paying six figures the purpose is to be able to earn a return on that investment from employment. Figuring out a philosophy on life can be done at a much lower cost elsewhere. In fact college life is so unlike non-college life it's unlikely to be very useful for that purpose anyway.
  - mips_avatar 5y ago
    In university you’re paying for a bunch of esteemed professors to do something. What do you think they should do? I would want to get something a little more valuable than some calculus homework sets.

eli_gottlieb 5y ago

>50% of students dropping out of engineering from freshman -> sophomore year is not normal. Of course it's normal. It's the "normal" that society chose. It's just only sustainable during an indefinite glut of applicants, which lets everyone pretend that the problems in our pedagogical methods are the kids' fault.

opportune 5y ago

We’ve basically continually eroded hard standards going into higher education and going out of it in many cases. Might as well continue it and keep promoting students out of university classes they don’t do well in too

mips_avatar 5y ago
I think academic rigor is alive and well in the tech industry. Just look at coding interviews "aka questions from upper level algorithms courses".