One thing that used to blow my mind was the difference between logical circuit design in CS vs CE/EE.

E.g. if the task was "Build a circuit to do X logic using these components AND, OR, XOR etc"

- In CS, it was " Please use the common shapes for each component"

- In CE/EE, it was "Please use the EXACT part code for EACH and EVERY component you use!"

I remember thinking: "Isn't the key lesson to learn the logic flow design vs being able to lookup each and every party number?? Is the EE department trying on purpose to get rid of people?"

You could make the argument that forcing people to do the detail but boring work is a good filter for people who are REALLY serious about EE but I would argue that there have to be better ways to do that.

Sounds virtually identical to my experience from high school on, across almost every subject. Thankfully I retained >0, but still not what I should’ve. Instead, what I learned is I could JIT memorize what I needed to know just to pass the test. Took me years after school to unwind that and deeply learn topics again (outside things I had an interest in learning, those were never a problem).

Even on CE, we had for first 2 years tons of absolutely mandatory EE courses which had 0 relevance to software development. One (Theoretical electrotechnics II) was especially hardcore due to 1) math used was tougher than actual dedicated math courses we had at that time; 2) the professor was an absolute a-hole, I mean proper evil twist in his personality... everybody on whole university hated him, I mean teachers, management, everybody, students were properly scared of him. He was so well known even people on other universities knew him well. But he had some good expertise in some topics so he was tolerated, and he served as biggest student filter on whole faculty.

He literally fired people from whole school (as in last attempt to pass this mandatory course, 2 attempts per year, if failed could repeat next year) in their 3rd year at uni, because of a single dot in whole equation calculation (which was at least 1 A4 per exercise). Dot was just above given variable in equation to give it different meaning than non-dot ones, and pens did often fail us back then (so after solving an example we all tripple-checked all dots were visible where they should be).

He often told girls they shouldn't study EE since its not for them, guys that had long hair that they should get back to their moms, people with hungarian-sounding names that they should go to Hungary etc... He was fired eventually.

If it hadn't been for him, EE would be above-average difficulty but definitely manageable subject. As it was done, one basically done university for CE degree once passing him. And the best thing of all this - he was consistently given only to teach and examine CE people only. EE people had such an easygoing professor that everybody passed it.

Needless to say, I loathed anything EE-related for quite some time. Schools have ways to effectively discourage even good topics to folks like me.