Open Ended Questions
One of the skills that engineers are required to have is critical thinking and the ability to quickly assess and analyze a situation. [Good] Engineers are often brought in to situations because they have a certain background or have worked on a particular topic before but this new situation is slightly different than their previous experience. However, the time to get immersed in a topic is limited and often, they’re asked for their opinion the same time that they’re learning about the new topic. This is difficult situation because the engineer often doesn’t have all of the pieces to put together a complete puzzle. However, they often have enough to get a clear picture of the situation to assess accordingly. Because this is a skill needed by engineers, one question for engineering educators is “how can this skill be taught?”. The best method that I can think of that can…
Comprehensive Exams and Curves
As you can see from the mean (47) and standard deviation (22) of my comprehensive exam results, the numbers are a lot lower than I expected. I thought the exam would be tough, fair, but tough. I did get comments from students saying things like that but nevertheless, the numbers are lower than expected and basically show more than 23rds of the class would be failing. I mentioned a few weeks ago at GEARS that grades in engineering programs are skewing towards the 80-90 range. I would prefer a system that grades 0-100 (0r 0-10) where above a 50% is passing. While that won’t fly academically, it’s probably a true representation of the material learned by the average student. But because educators must deal with this grade inflation and dissatisfied students in a course are more likely to write negative reviews than satisfied students writing positive reviews, this presents a significant problem.…