Perhaps colleges and universities need to follow the example of this high-school that figures it's more important to make students not feel discouraged than hold them to standards that will benefit both them and society. Then, as we drive over crumbling bridges, holding our breath hoping they don't fall apart, we can take comfort in knowing that we helped our students feel better about themselves.

Forgive my tone but hearing how the drama unfolded for the teacher in that article made me mad whenever I heard about it. And it seems to me that the policy of this high-school would be the sort of thing that would be the result trying to accommodate the sentiment in the OP. People don't gain anything when they're told they're doing a good job but they're really not.

I'm all in favor for finding different ways to cram the same information into different people's heads due to their different learning styles and speeds but engineering isn't any more too hard than the sun is too hot. It just is what it is and you have to find ways to deal with it if you're aiming in that direction.

The teacher in that story did get fired but found another job. I think he's planning on a law-suit of some kind and has lots of support from the public. The school board maintains it's policy and believes they've done the right thing. One day when I send my kids to school, I will make sure their school does not have a similar policy even if it means moving somewhere else to do it. No free lunch, kids.

Some of the best engineers worked on the apollo shuttle in 2003, yet it still failed and blew up during its entry in orbit.

There, fixed it for you.

Hardcore problems need hardcore answers. The problems don't become easier just because the applicant pool is less-skilled. This is a perfect, if dramatic, example of how much detail matters in many areas. If you had 5-10 of the best minds on the planet concentrated on literally every square inch of the shuttle, and the entire process of launch, flight, and recovery, and this still happened, then you surely don't want any of those people being folks that forget to carry their 1s, or who introduce even the tiniest of unfounded assumptions into their work.

All engineering is "detail oriented" -- you'll see this phrase on nearly any job listing -- part of the duty of the college is to weed out those who are not detail oriented.

In Mathematics and engineering, detail oriented usually means checking your answers. In fact, I would posit that you should know the score you'll get on your homework even before it's graded, because you should know which ones you got wrong, and why, and have hopefully had a chance to correct them so that you can get a good score. Obviously you may not have enough time to do this during quizzes and exams, but the exercise on the rest of your coursework should make you better able to do things right the first time.

In my college calculus text, the answers to odd-numbered problems were in the back of the book. We got assignments from the even-numbered problems. The first thing I did when I got an assignment was to do *all* off the corresponding odd-numbered problems, showing all work, and checked the answers. If I got them wrong, I examined the work until I figured out why that was, and then re-did the problem. Rinse and repeat until all problems were correct. Then I did the assignment, taking extra care of the forms of problems that gave me difficulties. Then I checked the answers in various ways (substituting variables back into the original equation, checking units and signs, order of magnitude, substituting "easy" terms in place of "hard" ones, etc) to either be sure of their correctness, or at least have a high-level of confidence.

This is actually the essence of engineering -- an engineer *knows* the answer beyond a doubt before anyone else, and doesn't rely on other's to tell him the answer (an engineer also know's that he can make mistakes, so they often have other engineers corroborate their answer.)

[quote name='ISDCaptain01' timestamp='1348212926' post='4982269']
Some of the best engineers worked on the apollo shuttle in 2003, yet it still failed and blew up during its entry in orbit.

There, fixed it for you.

Hardcore problems need hardcore answers. The problems don't become easier just because the applicant pool is less-skilled. This is a perfect, if dramatic, example of how much detail matters in many areas. If you had 5-10 of the best minds on the planet concentrated on literally every square inch of the shuttle, and the entire process of launch, flight, and recovery, and this still happened, then you surely don't want any of those people being folks that forget to carry their 1s, or who introduce even the tiniest of unfounded assumptions into their work.

All engineering is "detail oriented" -- you'll see this phrase on nearly any job listing -- part of the duty of the college is to weed out those who are not detail oriented.

In Mathematics and engineering, detail oriented usually means checking your answers. In fact, I would posit that you should know the score you'll get on your homework even before it's graded, because you should know which ones you got wrong, and why, and have hopefully had a chance to correct them so that you can get a good score. Obviously you may not have enough time to do this during quizzes and exams, but the exercise on the rest of your coursework should make you better able to do things right the first time.

In my college calculus text, the answers to odd-numbered problems were in the back of the book. We got assignments from the even-numbered problems. The first thing I did when I got an assignment was to do *all* off the corresponding odd-numbered problems, showing all work, and checked the answers. If I got them wrong, I examined the work until I figured out why that was, and then re-did the problem. Rinse and repeat until all problems were correct. Then I did the assignment, taking extra care of the forms of problems that gave me difficulties. Then I checked the answers in various ways (substituting variables back into the original equation, checking units and signs, order of magnitude, substituting "easy" terms in place of "hard" ones, etc) to either be sure of their correctness, or at least have a high-level of confidence.

This is actually the essence of engineering -- an engineer *knows* the answer beyond a doubt before anyone else, and doesn't rely on other's to tell him the answer (an engineer also know's that he can make mistakes, so they often have other engineers corroborate their answer.)
[/quote]

Now that is a beautiful answer Too bad I cannot rep you here in this thread.
This also what we do at our CS department. Practice makes perfect. Or repeat, repeat and repeat it until you dream it.

Some of the best engineers worked on the apollo shuttle in 2003, yet it failed and blew up during its entry in orbit.

The what? Apollo and STS were completely separate programs with totally different vehicles...