On Tue, 2007-06-12 at 19:33 +0200, wouter van ooijen wrote:
> According to my fellow teachers these boys are not bad, they are
> typical. I hope for the safety of my country that serious engineering
> work is very quickly outsourced to countries where 18y boys still have
> at least some feeling for numbers and values...

Unfortunately you're right, the problem remains way past the "young
boys" stage.

My classic example is my 3rd year "Fields and Waves" EM course (in
2001). The course was run by a very "harsh but fair" prof who many
people were actually afraid of (including me in a small way, and despite
or because of this, I got the highest mark in his course then any other
course I took in university. I went into the final exam without having
revised on anything, he was that good). As an example, when he was
explaining an EM wave propagating through free space he asked us to
imagine a twisted gun ammo belt...

Anyways, the first quiz he gave us split the class in two (randomly).
One half got an insanely hard quiz which few of us got more then 2/10 (I
was part of the insanely hard quiz half).

The second quiz was an extremely easy "phasor" type problem. Off hand it
was something like a 1V phase 0 AC source powering a 1 Ohm load. The
question was simple: how much real power is being supplied by the
source.

The next class, he "discussed" the quizzes. He started by giving the
solution to the "hard" quiz, and stated he was disappointed we didn't do
better.

Then he started discussing the easy quiz. He wrote down the answer and
then started admonishing some of the horrible answers given. In many
cases the students had given answers like 1 + 0.5j or 0.7j, very odd
answers when being asked to supply how much REAL power was supplied. 

His worst example was a few students (no, he didn't name which students
had which answers) that answered something like 1x10E24 W. He stated how
he couldn't believe how a 3rd year electrical engineering student could
believe that a little 1V source supplying a 1 Ohm load would be
supplying more power then the whole planet probably uses!

It's an unfortunate fact that our education system doesn't seem to
distinguish between the students that simply memorize answers, and those
that UNDERSTAND the problems. I do hope that eventually people who got
through school without truly understanding the subjects they've taken
either take the time to actually LEARN their subject, or wisely move to
another industry. What scares me is some of these people are probably
out there, designing the technology we use every day... 

TTYL

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