| |
Confessions of an Engineering Washout
by Acidus at 9:01 am EDT, Sep 28, 2005 |
The course instructor was a legendarily incompetent teacher, even by the dubious standards of Smartypants U's engineering department. He was so incoherent and capricious that academic advisors were warned to steer students away from his courses. So why was he kept on staff? His research was outstanding. My tuition dollars at work. You will not produce thronging bevies of pocket-protector-wearing number-jockeys simply by handing out spiffy Space Shuttle patches at the local Science Fair. If you want more engineers in the United States, you must find a way for America's engineering programs to retain students like, well, me: people smart enough to do the math and motivated enough to at least take a bite at the engineering apple, but turned off by the overwhelming coursework, low grades, and abysmal teaching. Find a way to teach engineering to verbally oriented students who can't learn math by sense of smell. Demand from (and give to) students an actual mastery of the material, rather than relying on bogus on-the-curve pseudo-grades that hinge upon the amount of partial credit that bored T.A.s choose to dole out. Write textbooks that are more than just glorified problem set manuals. Give grades that will make engineering majors competitive in a grade-inflated environment. Don't let T.A.s teach unless they can actually teach.
While I'll save the long discussion about why having large barriers of entry into an engineering discipline is a *good* thing, this article did touch on a lot of what is wrong at Georgia Tech and other universities: complete disregard for their undergraduate students. I remember taking a 2nd year CS class where the average final grade was a 34. I had a 38 which earned me a B. When the average grade is *half* the value of the lowest passing grade, you are doing something very, very wrong. |
| |
RE: Confessions of an Engineering Washout
by dmv at 11:41 am EDT, Sep 28, 2005 |
Acidus quoted: The course instructor was a legendarily incompetent teacher, even by the dubious standards of Smartypants U's engineering department. He was so incoherent and capricious that academic advisors were warned to steer students away from his courses. So why was he kept on staff? His research was outstanding. My tuition dollars at work.
This hit a small hobby horse of mine -- tuition dollars. University tuition, especially at a private engineering university, is an enormous cost from the perspective of the student. But mostly from the prospective of a student, at a reasonable private engineering university. For example, we learn from the 2003 CMU annual report that net tuition and fees represent 34% of the operating revenue. We see a similar story from Georgia Tech. For CMU, 42% of revenue comes from "Sponsored Research"; for GATech, almost 5x the tuition revenue is "Gifts, Grants and Contracts". You say his research is outstanding? Guess how he, and the University, get paid. The question is not "why was he kept on staff" (even if we ignore Tenure), but perhaps "why was he kept teaching undergraduates". There are faculty here who don't interact with lower-level students very often, but who are definately profit-centers for the University. |
|
| | |
RE: Confessions of an Engineering Washout
by janelane at 1:51 pm EDT, Sep 28, 2005 |
dmv wrote:
Acidus quoted: The course instructor was a legendarily incompetent teacher, even by the dubious standards of Smartypants U's engineering department. He was so incoherent and capricious that academic advisors were warned to steer students away from his courses. So why was he kept on staff? His research was outstanding. My tuition dollars at work.
This hit a small hobby horse of mine -- tuition dollars. University tuition, especially at a private engineering university, is an enormous cost from the perspective of the student. But mostly from the prospective of a student, at a reasonable private engineering university. For example, we learn from the 2003 CMU annual report that net tuition and fees represent 34% of the operating revenue. We see a similar story from Georgia Tech. For CMU, 42% of revenue comes from "Sponsored Research"; for GATech, almost 5x the tuition revenue is "Gifts, Grants and Contracts". You say his research is outstanding? Guess how he, and the University, get paid. The question is not "why was he kept on staff" (even if we ignore Tenure), but perhaps "why was he kept teaching undergraduates". There are faculty here who don't interact with lower-level students very often, but who are definately profit-centers for the University.
And this comes back to the basic problem of research universities that they expect fantastic, contract-driven professors that have to teach whether or not they have a passion for teaching or are even mildly good it. A third of tuition dollars goes towards operating revenue? Fine...have 1/3 of the faculty be teaching and not research-oriented. Hire them for the teaching ability and desire for student success. Only professors with hardly any social life can even hope to be fantastic at everything as I've seen time and time again at my grad school. -janelane, PhD-phobic |
|
|
|
