Given the ammount of work I've put in the last three years I shouldn't have made it past maybe my third semester. I could see if I was going to alamance technical community but I was told that I was in one of the harder majors at one of the best engineering schools. For the last two years I have spent probably an average of an hour maybe two per week on hw/studying. Now my grades were pretty mediocre before I started taking my major classes but this is the real kicker... I know kids that get like low 40s on every single test, are they just letting everyone through?

This has been an astraladvent notice

11/14/2010 2:27:28 PM

itt AstralAdvent gets his esteem on.

11/14/2010 2:28:42 PM

America is a bunch of dummies, for sure

11/14/2010 2:29:16 PM

Ful of shame

I'm astraladvent and I approved this message

11/14/2010 2:31:07 PM

It's easier to milk students for money when they can't fail out.

11/14/2010 2:33:55 PM

Quote :

"SHAMEFULL"

11/14/2010 2:37:17 PM

lol yes. maybe you'd have a more difficult time as an english major or something

but no worries...i felt like this in undergrad AND grad school, too. it never ends.

[Edited on November 14, 2010 at 2:40 PM. Reason : .]

11/14/2010 2:40:06 PM

lol @ "shamefull"

11/14/2010 2:56:45 PM

If you have at least slightly above average intelligence, you should breeze through 95% of undergraduate schools.

11/14/2010 2:56:57 PM

you know. ive always wondered the consequence of having to learn more stuff than people before me.

ie-my dad was amazed at the shit i had to learn in basic chemistry classes. he had to take basic science classes too, but at that time there were still a lot of unknowns that are not unknown now. so i had to learn a lot more than he did, but in the same amount of time and the same classes.

make any sense?

[Edited on November 14, 2010 at 3:01 PM. Reason : nkl]

11/14/2010 3:01:00 PM

^my parent both graduated high school, but neither went to college.* Neither were able to help me with any of my homework from middle school onward.

*technically that's not true. my mom enrolled in junior college the same time that I was at NCSU, but I ended up helping her with algebra and physcial sciences.

Maybe things have changed or I'm just a dumbass, but I thought (mechanical) engineering school was pretty tough.

[Edited on November 14, 2010 at 3:07 PM. Reason : .]

11/14/2010 3:03:34 PM

well this is the internet, so if you didn't ace every class you took w/o attending you're not really up to par.

11/14/2010 3:05:12 PM

Quote :

"For the last two years I have spent probably an average of an hour maybe two per week on hw/studying."

Let me get this straight. You took ECE 200 and presumably a handful of other moderately difficult weed out courses and you claim to have spent less than 2 hours a week on all your homework and studying?

I guess I'm just a god damn knuckle dragger.

11/14/2010 3:06:37 PM

Engineering labs take way more than an hour a week. I call shenanigans! Although outside of doing my work I put very little effort into school, squeaked by with a 3.0 and passed the FE no problem. College is just a second HS these days cus kids don't mature like they used to. 18 yo seem like 14 yo now adays. Haha coming from a fresh faces 24 yo.

11/14/2010 4:48:59 PM

i just wanted to clarify that when i said i had similar sentiments in both undergrad and grad school, i meant about letting anyone through

not about spending that little amount of time on work. although in undergrad i probably did...i was also a political science major, though. the most time i spent on school related things was through research projects and papers. and in law school i definitely spent considerable more time on schoolwork, though not as much as many of my peers. i dunno, though. maybe if i averaged it...some people study a little each day and i am a last second crammer!

but i was surprised at how many people i encountered in higher education that seemed absolutely retarded. i am amazed that i wasn't last in my law school class...by all accounts i should have been, or at least close! so it makes me wonder what everyone else below me was doing. *shrug* i guess just not trying or caring. like at all.

11/14/2010 4:59:22 PM

they curve the shit out of some engineering classes because the kids are idiots and the teachers can't teach

gotta pass at least a certain percentage yo

11/14/2010 5:03:48 PM

Quote :

"SHAMEFULL"

Quote :

"ammount"

11/14/2010 5:11:27 PM

Quote :

"i was also a political science major, though. the most time i spent on school related things was through research projects and papers."

Same major here, and I had the same experience. It's already been said, but is worth repeating: if you're of even slightly above-average intelligence, you shouldn't have much of any problem in most American undergraduate schools...and likely in most masters programs as well.

Law school was a rude awakening for me in terms of the amount of time I had to spend on homework and in studying in general. There were certainly people who didn't do nearly the same amount of studying or prep work for class, yet still graduated, but the difference is that most of them still don't have a job actually practicing law, or didn't pass the bar exam.

I'd wager that you'd find yourself working quite a bit harder if you were in a doctoral program or something like that.

At the same time, just because you have an easy time at most things, it doesn't mean that the curriculum as a whole is shit. You may just be reeeeeealllly smart. Smart enough to spell shameful right. Oh wait...

11/14/2010 5:37:33 PM

Quote :

" Law school was a rude awakening for me in terms of the amount of time I had to spend on homework and in studying in general."

ditto. i did absolutely nothing in undergrad (outside of papers and cramming for tests at the last possible second). in law school i was like, oh shit i actually have to do the reading??

the whole doing work every night thing (and every weekend thing) was a pretty big shock after NCSU political science haha. but there were still a couple of people in my law school class that made me wonder...how the hell they graduated from college and got into grad school. people that still can't form coherent sentences or spell simple words. but whatever. those people are obviously the minority, but it kinda blew my mind.

and i worked fairly hard in school (just not as hard as some of the super cray cray people) and graduated in the top 1/2 of my class, but still didn't pass the bar. so *shrug* whatever. i also graduated in 2.5 years instead of 3 and not by choice...so my last year was a bit of a struggle (to say the least).

[Edited on November 14, 2010 at 5:47 PM. Reason : .]

11/14/2010 5:46:53 PM

either a lot has changed since i went here, you are way smarter than me, or you're just making shit up...

11/14/2010 5:48:18 PM

i know i'd never be able to come close to passing an engineering class at ncsu. so it seems like it is hard to me

11/14/2010 5:51:23 PM

Quote :

" and i worked fairly hard in school (just not as hard as some of the super cray cray people) and graduated in the top 1/2 of my class, but still didn't pass the bar. so *shrug* whatever. i"

There were plenty of people in my class that I was shocked to see didn't pass (same with people on the other end who were just plain bad all 3 years, but somehow passed)...I'm pretty certain their method of grading the essays is to throw a stack of responses down a flight of stairs, and the ones that go farthest down get the best stairs.

Still, I think that for most undergraduate majors, if you graduate and think that you've achieved this monumental objective, and that there aren't any other true challenges out there, you're wrong as hell.

My class (and I think every class at any law school ever) was filled with people who had almost uniformly had a really easy time in every educational endeavor they'd had so far. Then most of them got tripped up given the actual challenge of the first year, and the attitude for many of them was just "Pshh, I know I'm smarter than everyone else here, and I could easily knock this out of the park if I really cared, but I don't, so there."

11/14/2010 5:53:53 PM

Quote :

"Still, I think that for most undergraduate majors, if you graduate and think that you've achieved this monumental objective, and that there aren't any other true challenges out there, you're wrong as hell. My class (and I think every class at any law school ever) was filled with people who had almost uniformly had a really easy time in every educational endeavor they'd had so far. "

this!!! 100% agreed.

11/14/2010 5:57:02 PM

I always thought of myself as an average smart kid, but I had to work in college. Aerospace Engineering wasn't always hard (sometimes it was), but it required a lot of time.

Maybe it is just me, but I did work hard and am quite proud of my degree. Considering the matriculation and drop-out rate in Aero, I'd say the university isn't letting everyone through.

11/14/2010 6:16:53 PM

Quote :

"Aerospace Engineering wasn't always hard (sometimes it was), but it required a lot of time. "

I have a huge amount of respect for majors like yours. These are the type that are the exception to the rule. I would've failed my ass out with a quickness if I'd gone the route you took, and had friends in that major (along with others in the eng. field) who worked their asses off consistently over 4 years, no matter how smart they were.

That said, I still think that there are people within every major that have an easier time with the basic curriculum, but would be legitimately challenged in most graduate programs.

11/14/2010 6:20:54 PM

[old]

11/14/2010 6:21:38 PM

Quote :

"they curve the shit out of some engineering classes because the kids are idiots and the teachers can't teach"

this is pretty much true.

and i did about 90% of my learning from the textbooks.

11/14/2010 6:26:39 PM

ITT: Why am I smarter than everyone?

11/14/2010 10:00:09 PM

Quote :

"Aerospace Engineering wasn't always hard (sometimes it was), but it required a lot of time."

I might be misremembering my history here, but I kinda remember giving you some pretty bad grades on lab reports back in your undergrad years...



(holy crap that was unprofessional...)

11/14/2010 10:09:17 PM

Believe me, they weed out the ppl who can't hang in engineering fast, or atleast they did in CHE when I was there. I had several lab classes in college that required 50-60 page lab reports every 2 weeks. It doesn't matter how smart you are....its going to take more than a couple hours to do the lab and type the reports.

Also, in just about all of my CHE classes we had an average of atleast 4 or 5 hours of hw a week per class. Some of those you could have had the answer key sitting beside you and it would have taken an hour just to copy it in your handwriting. I didn't know what hw or studying was in my basic chemistry, physics, and math classes...but once you hit those engineering classes it kicks into a new level.

11/14/2010 10:13:33 PM

the lack of any actual legitimate useful Networking classes in ECE undergrad is shameful

11/14/2010 10:14:23 PM

Supergeniuses ITT

11/15/2010 1:26:57 AM