Comment by skrtskrt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skrtskrt | Hacker News Reader

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I would say most of the STEM majors at my university (top 20 US school) pushed students to the absolute brink in the first year, jam packed with advanced math, physics, and chemistry. It was pretty normal to come out of freshman year engineering, CS, or chemistry with a sub-2.75 GPA and the joy of learning completely stomped out of you.

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.

> It was pretty normal to come out of freshman year engineering, CS, or chemistry with a sub-2.75 GPA

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.

My department's policy was a 3.2 curve. So half the students in every class got B+ or worse. 2.75 is a B-, most classes had at least 30% at or below there.

Fair question, there are a few things at play.

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.

This was my experience as well at a small engineering school.

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