Getting Real Value Out of An Engineering Education (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

"Atrocious ranking", according to whom?