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Engineering is hard and you better understand calculus and be smart and an analytical and creative thinker, things that are not present together in everyone. Th

Engineering is hard and you better understand calculus and be smart and an analytical and creative thinker, things that are not present together in everyone. That is fine. Not everyone has the same strengths. I am not a great basketball player and never will play in the NBA. I am a good swimmer but even so I will never compete in the olympics. The science and engineering fields have always had weeder classes where those who are not up to it realize their error and find another major. That is not a problem. There is almost the presumption in these articles that everyone is equal and schools should be able to take any random person off the street and form them into a competent engineer through proper training. It is a fallacy that that is possible.

tdfx 15y ago
I've taken the weeder classes at decent colleges and I have to say that "not up to it" simply means undisciplined. While my experience isn't all-encompassing, I personally haven't seen any undergraduate class that couldn't be passed by almost any of the students with a sustained effort. Some students are more naturally inclined for the hard sciences than others. It doesn't mean they can't do it. It just means they have to work harder at it. Most just choose not to.
gergles 15y ago
The idea that there need to exist "weeder classes" is utterly stupid. The admissions process is the "weeder" process. If you can't hack it, you shouldn't be admitted at all. Taking students, who you have already identified as competent and likely to succeed by admitting them, then trying to get rid of a huge percentage of them with an arbitrarily-difficult course, is just stupid. The mindset of "we have to clean out the riff-raff" in engineering is why so many people drop out, not that people are unqualified, it's that irrelevant, difficult material is the first thing you encounter, and you learn it then immediately discard it when you move on to material that's even tangentially related to what you will do every day as an engineer.

tdfx 15y ago

I've taken the weeder classes at decent colleges and I have to say that "not up to it" simply means undisciplined. While my experience isn't all-encompassing, I personally haven't seen any undergraduate class that couldn't be passed by almost any of the students with a sustained effort. Some students are more naturally inclined for the hard sciences than others. It doesn't mean they can't do it. It just means they have to work harder at it. Most just choose not to.

gergles 15y ago

The idea that there need to exist "weeder classes" is utterly stupid. The admissions process is the "weeder" process. If you can't hack it, you shouldn't be admitted at all. Taking students, who you have already identified as competent and likely to succeed by admitting them, then trying to get rid of a huge percentage of them with an arbitrarily-difficult course, is just stupid. The mindset of "we have to clean out the riff-raff" in engineering is why so many people drop out, not that people are unqualified, it's that irrelevant, difficult material is the first thing you encounter, and you learn it then immediately discard it when you move on to material that's even tangentially related to what you will do every day as an engineer.