Getting Real Value Out of An Engineering Education

by evck • 13 years ago

26 15 13 years ago

kwantam• 13 years ago

It's really hard for me to take this article seriously when it opens with the claim that engineering classes are about memorization. That couldn't be further from my experience.

I did undergrad and grad degrees in EE/CS, and with very few exceptions none of the classes I took rewarded rote memorization. Quite the opposite: they were all about learning the fundamentals of the material and then applying those fundamentals to more difficult problems.

In fact, I went out of my way to avoid classes that boiled down to memorization: I wanted to take too many good classes to bother with crappy ones. Perhaps I took it too far: in freshman chemistry they gave us a quiz early in the semester where we were expected to reproduce the first 60 or 80 elements from the periodic table. I computed that the quiz was only worth about 1% of my grade for the term and didn't even show up for class that day.

evck• 13 years ago

I suppose our experiences differ. I've found the majority of classes to reward most the points on exams that require knowing how to do a specific subset of problems from the course.

theck01• 13 years ago

I am jealous that your university had such good classes. Classes that did more than emphasize solving artificial problems through rote memorization, rather than real ones however simple, were the exception rather than the rule in my computer engineering degree.

mctx• 13 years ago

I'm with you - most of the units in my course could be passed by simply memorising formula and procedure.

I had a conversation with a final year electrical engineer with a high distinction average who had no idea what a relay was or how it was used, or how you'd power a motor from a microcontroller - something I'd expect high school level electronics students to know. He's great at calculations and exams, follows lab manuals and gets good grades, but (imho) would make a poor practicing engineer.

austinz• 13 years ago

When I was taking EE/CS courses, I'd consciously try to look for courses with large, open-ended projects (without eschewing theory completely). Although project classes can be run very poorly, the good ones tend to be the exact opposite of memorization/test-regurgitation.

graeham• 13 years ago

I think instead of knowledge memorization (like the periodic table), the author is refering to algotithm memorization, where the exam is testing your ability to reproduce the process of solving the problem. There is some validity to this in that it is possible to do well on an exam by reproducing the process without understanding the materials. Good examiners can write questions and grade in ways that support deeper understanding than algorithm memorization.

On the other hand however, education is about the process of learning. The advanced techniques used in engineering aren't immedieatly understood by many (any?) students. So the first steps in learning these techniques is mimicing existing work. Not alltogether different than actual engineering practice.

Aside: I do think time spent on student teams is very complementary to taught engineering programs, and spent 5 of 7 years in university doing Solar Car racing.

munin• 13 years ago

the author is refering to algotithm memorization, where the exam is testing your ability to reproduce the process of solving the problem.

and none of the higher-level courses I took in math or CS rewarded that either

aet• 13 years ago

How did this get pushed up so far? Not much content or explanation here...

dinkumthinkum• 13 years ago

I think the OP is just young and is trying to throw his hat into the "theory" vs "practical" debate that most of us probably find rather pedestrian at this point; perhaps this is a big discovery for him. I agree with you, of course, that it is overly dismissive of engineering coursework. If you listen to people on HN, college has absolutely no substantive value whatsoever, there are only a few that admit it might have some social value. Interestingly enough, most of those people claim that blogs and courses on Udacity or Coursera are the "real" places to get information (which is odd considering they are fine product but are simply faint, faint copies of university style education).

As well, I find it a bit assuming those who thing we should be focusing on teaching students "real, unsolved problems" when ... they struggle with solving the solved problems. I think there's a place for both but there's this "rally against the establishment" thing that goes on.

mikepurvis• 13 years ago

I graduated from UW engineering in 2010, and I'm certainly sympathetic to this perspective. The most practical and worthwhile experience comes from good co-op placements, doing student team work, and working on an interesting fourth-year design project.

There were definitely some courses which rewarded memorization—especially the EE courses, as I recall. My exam for an analog filters course was almost entirely graded on my ability to produce schematics for various op-amp filter configurations. Similarly for a power electronics course, which was largely about memorizing equivalent circuits for non-ideal transformers and DC motors, and computing the values of the various resistors and capacitors which account for losses in those types of systems.

And his remark about labs is on the mark, too. Pretty much every time I deviated from the precise step-by-step instructions to "explore the material", I was docked points. The TAs marking my lab report just weren't interested in what I was learning or discovering—they had a checklist of specific plots and statements they were expecting to find in the report, and that's what the grade came from.

WalterBright• 13 years ago

At Caltech, exams were routinely open book / open note. That means memorizing things was pointless.

yareally• 13 years ago

I would say CS is probably the least focused degree on memorization one can find at most schools. Compared to the Pharmacy and Accounting degrees my siblings obtained, I barely had to memorize anything at all (at least for courses in CS/CS&E department). I did my undergrad at Ohio State and many tests were open book (or some notes allowed).

Material you were tested on was generally what you did on your labs, so if you did well on the labs, then the test wasn't an issue. I never had a professor require memorizing syntactical things, such as names of functions in a particular language. If we needed to write code a test, a reference sheet was provided for functions/collections and the parameters they took.

catmanjan• 13 years ago

UoW has an atrocious ranking for engineering so I'm not surprised.

theorique• 13 years ago

"Atrocious ranking", according to whom?

gaelow• 13 years ago

Working on a car in a shop is about engineering about as much as driving a car to work is about piloting an F1 race car.

Getting Real Value Out of An Engineering Education

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