And that’s ok, but we shouldn’t expect just because the admissions office let someone into a program that they’re qualified to build bridges after spending 4-5 years on a campus. It shouldn’t be emotionally abusive or anything like that, but I personally want to know that engineers have been put through some serious training so that the buildings I’m in stay standing, the water I’m drinking stays clean, and the electricity that I depend on for all but the barest of life’s essentials keeps flowing.
What we need to do is normalize failure being acceptable, and encourage trying.
To lean on a sports analogy: Not every kid who plays little league baseball is going to play for their high school team, not every high school player gets a shot in the minors, not every minor leaguer gets into the pros, not every pro is an all star, not every all star is the MVP. And all those are ok, sometimes physical and mental limitations come into play, and sometimes people just decide they’re not interested in pursuing something anymore due to the trade offs required for the next level.
I'm reminded of Harvey Mudd's(1) success in creating a Comp Sci program with good gender ratios. They found the main reason women were dropping out of or not trying comp sci was due to intimidation factors, or to simplify grouping experts with beginners in the same classes made the beginners feel inadequate and quit. The solution they came up with was to split the classes based on computer experience levels and let the experts take a fast track class.
I believe engineers or any medical professions could benefit similarly, instead of merely weeding people out with difficulty(which mostly translates to familiarity or previous experience)we could instead let those already familiar fast track it and those less familiar become familiar to the point of competence. It could benefit everyone really.
1. https://www.inc.com/kimberly-weisul/how-harvey-mudd-college-...
Weeder courses are more like an obstacle course or the (perhaps: literal) obstacles in the collegiate course. Lab techs that give you slightly wrong ingredients or technically the right ingredients if you knew some trick. Math problems that require some trick to prove or otherwise shoot you down 8-12 hours of grind with no solution. Or just giving the student a large matrix to calculate the determinate of without a calculator. Or marking -10% (out of 100%) for each, individual grammar mistake.
The conditions you described sound closer to "unfair" than just "weeder". I've heard of people describe certain courses as "weeder", but that's because they covered difficult material and had difficult assignments, not because the teachers were actively sabotaging the students.
* Large lecture sizes, often with professors who cannot teach or don't care to
* Little student-professor engagement
* Large discussion sections with TA's who can't teach either
* Usually focused on calculation over rigor or depth. Usually no proofs, actual reasoning behind things hand-waved away, focus is on memorization.
* Large homework loads
* Large test loads or particularly high-stakes exams
* De facto pass requirements drastically different from the actual grading scheme used in the course (eg: requiring an 80-90% grade to stay in the major in a course where the professor expects the average exam grade to be 40-50%). This often leads to curving the grades arbitrarily to get the cohort size the department actually wants.
Programming requires a certain individual that likes solving problems and learning. Not everyone is made to program. Currently, software engineers in US are some of the best paid individuals with just a bachelors degree. Frankly, if you are intelligent, can code, and learn math on your own you don't even need one. That kind of money drives more students towards CS programs.
In my programming 101 70% of students did not even attend the final. Then, next programming class was a better with high percentage of students passing. Eventually, when we got to class like theory of computation 80% of people failed to finish.
I met a guy who graduated after trying to obtain his BS in CS for 7 years. He still is not employed in the tech field.
I'm kind of astounded that your program was so badly calibrated that first 70% of freshman dropped the major rather than take the final exam, and then, several years of curriculum later, the 300 or 400-level theory class still fails 80% of its students. What the hell? But I suppose by my own definition, that's basically what we should expect from using weeder courses to stop people majoring in a field for money.
Still, at least at my undergrad institution, once you got past the weeder courses, a fail or drop rate of 80% would be considered pretty bad.
Of course it's normal. It's the "normal" that society chose. It's just only sustainable during an indefinite glut of applicants, which lets everyone pretend that the problems in our pedagogical methods are the kids' fault.