Comment by gotaquestion | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gotaquestion | Hacker News Reader

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The toxicity on this site still amazes me. We have people here claiming, "It's only English, would never fly with engineering." How horrendously dismissive and arrogant an attitude. As if engineering is some god-like holy discipline that sorts the "real" students from the "fake" ones. This professor makes many valid points, and I think it would be entirely applicable to engineering. It's like you never analyzed an op-amp? That is a scalable demonstration of knowledge, that can be critiqued and revised.

Circuit design is more an art than a science, that's why two of the most popular non-textbooks on the topic are called:

"Analog Circuit Design: Art, Science, and Personalities" - Williams

"The Art of Electronics" - Horowitz and Hill

Get over yourselves.

EDIT: If you read these two books, they focus on the highly subjective nature of analog design, and how multiple designs can still meet the design criteria, but have a certain elegance about them that is an expressive quality of personality. The same could be said about source code, in that an experienced programmer can deliver creative alternatives to the most naive solution that solves the problem. Sure, it is important to learn that 1+1=2 (or 11, depending on '+'), but the same can be said of English, where spelling and grammar matter, and mistakes can be just as deadly as Metric vs Imperial.

Indeed.

In my most challenging and valuable CS classes, the ones I think about still to this day, the grades were practically irrelevant. We spent most of our time looking over our solutions, talking about why one person did it one way and another person did it another way. We could tell when a solution was efficient or elegant, and when a solution was awkward or clumsy. And we all learned from it.

We never compared each other's grades. Honestly, I have no idea what anyone else's grade ever was. And today I have no idea what my own grades ever were. But when our project was up on the screen for the whole class to see, we knew right away where we stood relative to our peers. And that is every bit as true today in my work as it was back then.

"Un-grading" strikes me as better preparation for being a real-world contributor and, dare I say, leader, than grades.

Peehaps your argument is about how engineering should be taught, and everyone is saying how it is taught as black-and-white answers.

I studied Electronic Engineering, and I would say 95% of the questions in my exams had a correct answer, with zero subjectivity. It was decades ago in NZ so maybe things have improved?

> 95% of the questions in my exams had a correct answer,

Of course. There's only one answer to 9 = 3x (at the undergrad level).

Just like there's only one way to spell "correct".

English has "correct answers" too.

> with zero subjectivity.

Really? Wow, that's impressive. I don't understand how that is even possible.

I can think of 10 different ways to implement a linked list. Which one is correct?

I can think of 10 different ways to build a single-transistor amplifier that meet frequency and gain specifications, which one is correct?

And that's just two examples off the top of my head of applied knowledge that are absolutely subjective.

Want more?

:)

To some degree, but I think a lot of more objective fields like natural sciences and engineering like to exaggerate the "artiness" of their work because they don't want to come across as uncreative robots just as the more subjective subjects like to exaggerate the "science" of their fields (even often naming their field <name> science which is a bit like how communist dictatorships liked to call themselves "democratic republics").

I'm not sure about that. Questions like "Given the following problem description, write out a solution" is not in any sense more objective than the humanities. The fact that STEM professors are less likely to ask that type of question on an exam does not change the artiness of the field.

That's still a judgemental statement but has not nothing to do with the fundamental complaint: that learning isn't about ranking and rating to multiple decimal places, and that Language curricula isn't somehow inferior to Engineering.

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