We taught a helicopter ground school today at East Coast Aero Club. One of the students was a recent graduate in mechanical engineering from Northeastern University. He was unable to understand or work with the concepts of potential and kinetic energy, achieving the lowest score on the final exam out of the 15 or so people present (folks who’d majored in political science achieved near-perfect scores, for example). His score was slightly better than chance, which put him above a Boston University engineering graduate last spring. A remarkable number of U.S. science and engineering graduates seem to have missed the entire “big picture” of science and engineering.
“The Shadow Scholar”, an article by a guy who writes term papers, makes me wonder if the schools in question can be exonerated for granting bachelor’s degrees to those who are almost entirely ignorant and unskilled. The 105th comment on the article is interesting: “Mandatory math, statistics, physics, and chemistry courses are my bread-and-butter. Online grading and test taking allow me to earn a good living. I have done this for students ranging from secondary school to medical school. For me, business has exploded with online courses and the poor economy. Overburdened faculty try to find the most efficient way to administer exmas and they have opened up a surprisingly lucrative business area.”
There’s no way to prevent cheating on online tests except the way you prevent cheating on regular tests – have the exam taker prove his identity and take it under supervision. That’s how standardized tests work – why shouldn’t any other test be the same way?
So now the teachers can generate the exams automatically, and obviously the next step for the Shadow Scholar business is to computerize exam answering, so we’ll have machines talking to, and grading machines. When the Shadow Scholar computer gets graduated, it will be able to get the job and we will be able to go on holiday. Acapulco!
Whenever you post these, I’m just shocked. I understood the practical application of potential and kinetic energy to flying when playing with flight sims in elementary school. I really don’t think I’m that far outside the norm.
At my first job out of engineering school, I was having an argument with a colleague about the mechanics of a screw drive, specifically how a particular bearing wasn’t intended to support axial thrust. We were going around in circles so I said “OK, let’s just draw the free body diagram of it and talk it through.”
He said, “what’s a free body diagram?”
In fairness, it wasn’t a job that demanded much.
As Bruce Schneier put it:
I once had an intern that had a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis (supposedly a very good program) who didn’t know what a socket wrench was. I had to take him out into the shop and show him so that he could detail wrench clearances around hex head bolts in the drawings he was drafting.
It’s amazing that he was able to afford flying lessons after paying for tuition at Northeastern!
Attikus: Excellent point. He was one of our Groupon customers, $69 for an intro lesson.
I’m feeling uncertain of my knowledge on these topics – would you mind sharing the questions so that your readers can rate themselves?
I once had a computer science course that was essentially an A+ course (used the CompTIA A+ book), which, at the time sounded like it could be useful – set up a server, install VM, troubleshoot hardware, install networks, etc., but which ended up being nearly useless.
In terms of tests, we basically installed some software that came with the book – 100 multiple choice questions that you could answer and read over all the correct ones at the end of the test. Our teacher would pick 50, and we took the test. That’s it. No lab work, no group work, no showing off exactly what we learned in terms of hands-on work we actually did for homework. Just memorizing answers.
Of course, these tests had the most silly, pedantic questions; like how many pins on a specific type of RAM. That information by itself, who cares? The more important thing would be to figure out what type of RAM the motherboard supports and how to know you have the correct kind. Of course, the software only ran on Windows, so I couldn’t use it as a Linux user at the time, and our labs weren’t set up in any way to identify CS majors as such and let us install software.
So obviously, at the end of the course, because there was no follow ups to ours labs or homework, and tests were useless at gauging how much we had learned, we came away with zero understanding or conception of even the most basic computer hardware fundamentals.
I think the fact one can become a CS grad without any concept of the internals of computers (mind you, this class was an *elective* under my CS course system) is fairly analogous to your mechanical engineer in its absurdity.
sbaumann: What’s a typical question? The whole class is conducted as a question and answer session. We start by trying to figure out what creates lift and ask “If you stick your hand out the window of a moving car and tilt it upward, do you get lift? If so, what from?” (remember that they supposedly have just read some FAA book chapters online) In talking about the Bernoulli effect we talk about kinetic energy varying with the square of the air’s velocity by asking “Would you rather crash your car into a brick wall at 2 mph or 20 mph?” In introducing autorotations we ask “You’re at 500′ above the ground, straight and level at 70 knots, with the blades spinning at 400 rpm. You run out of gas and the engine quits. What sources of energy do you have to enable a smooth landing?”
Josh: How many pins on RAM chip? That does seem useless in the surface mount age. Is it practical for a hobbyist to build stuff at this level anymore? I would think that the best that one could do would be to program an FPGA in an evaluation kit. (I will try not to embarrass myself by talking about hand-soldering and wire-wrapping in the 1970s and 1980s.)
For the record, I am a graduated Northeastern mechanical engineer, and I found the ground instruction to be pretty useful and interesting. It’s certainly not the math-based physics lesson I’m used to, but I found it to be a pretty good high level overview of aerodynamics with a much better real world application viewpoint.
I missed two or three questions on the test, I think all of which were related to actual helicopter controls and flight; perhaps I’d have been happier to miss the physics questions. I do agree that someones technical experience likely has little bearing on their overall ability to score well on the test. There is no substitute for paying attention or completing the reading.
The flight itself was most definitely an experience to remember. I was headed back to California just a few weeks after passing my ground test, and bad weather pushed my flight date back to the same day I was due to leave. Despite some gusty winds, my instructor did a great job keeping my flight in control, entertaining, and informative. The best moments were definitely in the end stages of the flight as we lost altitude and gained ground speed while coming in to land. You don’t really realize how fast a helicopter is, especially considering how awkward the machine looks.
Marcus: Thanks for the feedback and we’re glad that you came to East Coast Aero Club last spring, before you finished school. I didn’t mean to single out Northeastern. As noted in the earlier posting, almost any U.S. bachelor’s program in science or engineering seems to turn out a high percentage of folks who were able to manipulate symbols on the problem sets and exams, but who can’t do “back of the envelope” thinking.
What happens when a math teacher plagarizes questions without credit? One of my teenager’s problems involving perfect numbers was copied without credit. In that case, is it ok for the student to copy the answer too? If not, what lesson is taught about valuing other’s intellectual property?
One point seems to be that young people are missing the entire “big picture.” The point is well taken.
Beyond the attitudes of young people, there is an interesting issue. A physicist will tell you casually that classical physics means physics from the 19th century. Basic physics builds on ideas from Galileo, Newton, and earlier minds. But the mid to late 1800s was a time in which ideas were consolidated into a form that any engineer would recognize. Ohm wrote a book on circuit theory. Maxwell formulated electricity and magnetism. Grassmann, Hamilton, Gibbs and others worked out vectors. Wikipedia reviews the long history of thermodynamics, but Gibbs created a modern formulation, including statistical mechanics. Fluid mechanics was worked out—the theoretical basis for understanding flight. By 1900, that package was being wrapped up. Einstein’s year of discoveries in 1905 rang the bell for the modern era, and the great minds began moving on to new topics.
When I studied engineering and then physics in the 1960s, classical physics appeared to be an immutable legacy from geniuses. And it was, but the legacy was in fact fresh, less than a century old. There was still excitement about industries built on the knowledge base from 1900. Now the classical ideas are twice as old, roughly. A career can be “technical,” but depend on symbols and software. I don’t have a snap answer, but the issue could be discussed. Something like interactive museum exhibits could offer nuggets of the old excitement.
#15
If I were going to hire someone, I’d be more curious to see what projects they worked on in their spare time than their college degree. Your real education is what you proactively acquire, not what you sit and have shoved down your throat because someone said that’s where you’re supposed to be at age X.
I dropped out of college back in 1997 because I was having a lot more fun reading books on CGI and ISAPI programming at the bookstore and trying out the projects in them. Sadly I never stumbled across Mr. Greenspun’s book, as tying databases to Web pages was just what I was trying to learn at the time.
I had two useful C++ classes taught by a guy named Michael Main who actually understood how to teach programming. Everything else was a waste of time and money. I’ve never used calculus, physics, or any of the humanities I had to take because they wanted to make me a “well-rounded person”. I had to use some linear algebra once to calculate a multiple correlation. No problem, the algorithm and its explanation are up on Wikipedia.
I had one Scheme project in college as part of a programming languages class, and that was the limit of my exposure to functional programming. Then recently I stumbled across Abelson and Sussman’s lectures at MIT in 1986 and they have been a huge eye-opener. I’ve been playing around with F# for a couple of months and now see no need to go back to C#/C++, in which I’ve worked for most of my career. However, if you’d showed me this stuff back in 1996, I’d have rolled my eyes and said “Who uses this crap? Lisp? That’s an AI thing.” I was just too immature and inexperienced.
I guess the point of this long-winded post is that people learn what they want to learn. Having more apprenticeship options where people can TRY a range of things in the real world seems better to me than having them sit in classrooms for an extra 4 to 8 years and be lectured about them. Let them try and fail (under supervision) and then they’ll be inspired to go do some reading/practice to actually understand what’s going on. Or they’ll find out they hate it (in the real world) and go try something else instead of going 6 figures into debt first.
Quoting your poset: “One of the students was a recent graduate in mechanical engineering from Northeastern University..A remarkable number of U.S. science and engineering graduates seem to have missed the entire “big picture” of science and engineering.”
While you can draw whatever conclusions you wish to, “one” student” does not seem to be a reliable data pool for extrapolation to “a remarkable number…” as proposed.
Steve: Thanks for the statistics lesson. If you follow the link to the springtime post you’ll see that we’ve been doing these ground schools for a while (we sold 2600 intro lessons via Groupon in March 2010). The Northeastern graduate was just the freshest example of a technically clueless technical graduate of a U.S. university in our ground school. My statement about a “remarkable number” was based on the hundreds of ground school students that I’ve personally encountered (and seen exam scores for, since I have to sign them off to fly), not based on this particular guy.
Another Northeastern graduate who may not have gotten their money’s worth:
http://gawker.com/5696300/what-200000-in-student-debt-looks-like
…and a story of $550,000.00 student loan debt:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703389004575033063806327030.html
The cost/benefit ratio on a $69 helicopter lesson seems much better than that of a college degree these days.
I thought Northeastern had an extensive co-op program with paid internships:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeastern_University#Co-op.2FInternship_Program
Don’t students use some of that money they earn, plus any financial aid they get, to offset the cost of tuition? How much do these internships actually pay?