
Getting Real Value Out of An Engineering Education - evck
https://medium.com/p/cea10d1e3c41
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kwantam
It's really hard for me to take this article seriously when it opens with the
claim that engineering classes are about memorization. That couldn't be
further from my experience.

I did undergrad and grad degrees in EE/CS, and with _very_ few exceptions none
of the classes I took rewarded rote memorization. Quite the opposite: they
were all about learning the fundamentals of the material and then applying
those fundamentals to more difficult problems.

In fact, I went out of my way to avoid classes that boiled down to
memorization: I wanted to take too many good classes to bother with crappy
ones. Perhaps I took it too far: in freshman chemistry they gave us a quiz
early in the semester where we were expected to reproduce the first 60 or 80
elements from the periodic table. I computed that the quiz was only worth
about 1% of my grade for the term and didn't even show up for class that day.

~~~
graeham
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.

~~~
munin
> the author is refering to algotithm memorization, where the exam is testing
> your ability to reproduce the process of solving the problem.

and none of the higher-level courses I took in math or CS rewarded that either

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gaelow
Working on a car in a shop is about engineering about as much as driving a car
to work is about piloting an F1 race car.

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catmanjan
UoW has an atrocious ranking for engineering so I'm not surprised.

~~~
theorique
"Atrocious ranking", according to whom?

