4 ms·
I taught university (big state school) about 10 years ago and it was department policy to flunk >= 40% of each calculus class. We curved to accomplish this and
by erdos4d 4y ago
I taught university (big state school) about 10 years ago and it was department policy to flunk >= 40% of each calculus class. We curved to accomplish this and every class was told this was the policy on day 1. We got a mix of students at my school and this was to keep the dopes from designing airplanes and such. I personally would have been happier letting engineering do their own dirty work, but that was math's job and I like my plane flights to be uneventful, so yeah.
- mbg721 4y agoSo when they're checking airplane parts for quality, do they just rank them all and throw out the worst 40%? At my school, the engineering college was perpetually irritated because the Arts and Sciences college was using one of their required courses as a weed-out class for pre-meds, so there were perfectly good engineers failing prerequisites for no good reason.
- erdos4d 4y ago> So when they're checking airplane parts for quality, do they just rank them all and throw out the worst 40%? I have no idea about airplane parts, but I would not call an engineering student "perfectly good" if they couldn't make it through an engineering pre-med weeder. The level of technical ability I expect from an engineer is an order of magnitude greater than a doctor. They should be crushing it.
- mbg721 4y agoThe class I'm thinking of was organic chemistry for civil engineers, so it may have been kind of an edge case anyway.