I don't know if it was intentional or just the collective effect of having a bunch of professors with no teaching skills and god complexes who hated engaging with undergrads, happy to assign 40 hours of work per week per class with no regard to the fact that students are in 3 other equally-difficult classes.
Mostly (that I know of) people didn't switch out though, they just took the terrible treatment as it was supposedly normal to have a terrible GPA and terrible time in the STEM majors there. Also there were a lot of international students in the programs - I doubt going to America to study engineering and coming back with a liberal arts degree was an option for them.
Personally, I switched into Industrial Engineering which had notably fewer hard sciences requirements. Still miserable, but less so.
I also managed to find a loophole where each engineering major had its own stats class that was 95% the same content, then vaguely applying it to a problem in that field of study in a final project. So I satisfied my Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, etc. requirements by just taking MechE Stats and ChemE Stats.
They closed that loophole by the time I graduated by having one unified Stats course for all engineering majors.
Was it normal, or was that just what you and your friend group experienced? Is there any hard data?
I find it hard to believe that a 2.75 GPA would be anything but the bottom 10% or less of students.
Some Googling tells me the average final GPA for an engineer there is between 3.3 and 3.4, meaning a lot of people are going to graduate with much lower grades than that. I eventually graduated with a 3.5, but I was below 3 for quite some time. I had two Cs, a fair amount of low As, and a lot of Bs.
What tended to happen was that your GPA increases throughout your time in undergrad because:
* classes are easier later in the major, or they seem easier because you're more directly interested in the content and your classes up to this point have built up the base knowledge, rather than being the freshman year survey of "all the hardest but largely unrelated science classes all at once"
* your study skills improve
This doesn't really excuse how the students are treated in my opinion, both by the professors and generally how the system was set up. Obviously hard things are hard, but there were many, many brilliant students in a very dark place because the school just throws them in the deep end and says "fuck you".
Something like MIT's first semester being pass/fail only could have gone a long way.
Also we were on the quarter system, and engineers needed an absurd 48 classes to graduate, which is a full 4-class schedule every quarter without a single drop or failure in order to graduate on time.
These classes are the same content as full-semester classes at other schools, but crammed into 10 weeks to fit the quarter system.
My school seemed to revel in how hard it was, kids and professors would constantly disparage other top schools saying they were practicing grade inflation. To what degree that is true, who knows. Anytime you go to a top-but-not-Ivy-league school, people are going to talk about oh why our school is actually more legit, etc, whatever. Seemed like half jealousy and half Stockholm syndrome to me.
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.
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.
Probably the hardest one was Operating Systems. First day of class, you’re told not all of you will be here by the end of the class and it was true.
Fortunately we were graded at milestones, and our sins (bugs) were forgiven by replacing our individual buggy implementations with known working implementations that covered the concepts up to that point.
Luckily we were able to use C. We basically implemented file systems, shell executions, schedulers etc.
Only issue was if you had a race condition that wasn’t picked up in the earlier stages. GOOD luck finding that
Other schools make you apply to the major, and that process just weeds out those the dept thinks are not suited for the program.
I noticed this recently while looking at MIT's computer science program for a data structures class I could recommend to a family member.
Apparently MIT doesn't have an intro to data structures class. The I guess the assumption is that everyone applying to the program got their linked list/searching/sorting knowledge before beginning the program. They have a number of algorithm/datastructures classes but none of them teach the basic concepts. Similarly. I don't think they have an algebra I class (they have one called that, but its not what one learns in HS algebra, has calc/etc as prereqs). That might make sense because the basics of algebra are fairly consistent across HS curriculum and everyone takes it, but comp sci/data structures classes are all over the place, and I can see situations where a subset of students is scrambling to understand pointer linking/etc in the intro to algorithms class they have someone outside of the major taking their into to CS classes.
My school wasn't that mean. I think the programming II class was the weed class, and I think the deciding factor was that the projects just took a lot more time than homework you're likely to get in other 100 level courses. I had no CS background but with enough time I got through the homework. Not everyone had the time or the interest.
I have heard that some European universities are this way.
I think this is actually a reasonable policy since it allows for someone who has great potential but lacks the maturity to apply themselves in lower grades. They still have an opportunity to turn things around and become substantial contributors.
IIRC, for software/programming, any early class heavy with pointers/hardware/math served as a weeding function. So I'm not sure how students won't be pushed out at some point if they can't do the work.
A non-zero number at “competitive” schools in programs with reputations to uphold.
