ECAC 2024 Discussion Thread

[Jeff Hopkins '82]

Nothing against sever or student athletes in general, I know how hard it is to balance sports and school, but it's kinda funny that a 3.5 gpa wins scholar athlete of the year for the whole league.

3.5 in Engineering is like a 3.8 in another school though I think.

IIRC, the GPA of my graduating class in Engineering in the late 1960s was 2.7.

My GPA in ChemE was about 3.5.  I was 4th in the graduating class.

So Seger's GPA is pretty damn impressive.

[George64]

IIRC, the GPA of my graduating class in Engineering in the late 1960s was 2.7.

In the early '60s, the all-men's average was about 2.7, the all-women's a bit higher.  I recall scoring in the high 20s on an exam and beating the class average.

[Dafatone]

IIRC, the GPA of my graduating class in Engineering in the late 1960s was 2.7.

In the early '60s, the all-men's average was about 2.7, the all-women's a bit higher.  I recall scoring in the high 20s on an exam and beating the class average.

Upper level math classes were fun in the mid 00s because you could get like a 36/100 and still get an A-.

Pretty sure the professors just cooked up monstrosities to see if the one or two geniuses in the class could still ace them. Said geniuses would score in the 90s, then everyone else waaaaaay below that.

[upprdeck]

I remember a physics course at my college where in the class of 60 only 10 of us got better than a zero..  made my 16 look pretty impressive as a solid B and I took it and was happy.

All I remember was looking at the questions with no idea what to do and when we got the answers back I was like why would I ever think to use some formula used in electricity to get to the answer on gravity/friction type question when we haven't even covered that in the course yet..

like use ohms law to figure out how fast a car would roll down an incline plane.

[Trotsky]

so those of us who went to college in the 80s can say our B's are really A's?

No. We can say that a lot of our B's were really C's, and a lot of our A's were really B's.

[Trotsky]

I recall scoring in the high 20s on an exam and beating the class average.

To be fair, this happened to me in EE 230 in 1983 (my 17 on the midterm was in the first decile).  Sometimes it's the class... sometimes it's the instructor.

[Trotsky]

like use ohms law to figure out how fast a car would roll down an incline plane.

When in doubt, use trig substitution.

[Trotsky]

Pretty sure the professors just cooked up monstrosities to see if the one or two geniuses in the class could still ace them. Said geniuses would score in the 90s, then everyone else waaaaaay below that.

This makes sense for advanced mathematics.  You aren't going into math as a field unless you are an absolute genius -- like, the kind of genius that makes it difficult to navigate in meat world.  So you might as well filter for them and hope you find, say, one a decade. The people there taking it to fulfill an Engineering requirement get the booby prize of making 60x as much in a field with 6000x the likelihood for employment.

But they, and we, will never hear the chimes at midnight.

[Robb]

Those impossible tests never made sense to me until a prof explained that if a student - any student - gets a 100 on a test, then you don't really know how much they know.  You know they know at least as much as was covered on the test, but that's all you can say for sure.  It's still useful to know on a test with a mean of 40, which genius gets the 85 and which one gets the 90.   I was just glad those guys were there to increase the standard deviation!

[Jeff Hopkins '82]

I had one test in ChemE senior year where I got a 42 and that was the mean.  Later in the semester, I ran into the prof (at a party) and asked him what he was trying to prove with that test.  He said he wanted everyone to know that just because it was senior year, we weren't going to coast through his course.  My response was, "Did you ever think that might turn us off to anything you have to say?"  When he said he hadn't, I said he might want to think about it.  Then I said, "Oh by the way, I'm going to ace your course."  (Narrator:  He did.)

I always thought that the exams in ChemE were designed to take 1-1/2 hours...but they only gave you an hour to take it.  The trick was to figure out which were the easy questions - answer those first - then get as far on the really hard question as you could until time ran out.

[jtwcornell91]

I remember a physics course at my college where in the class of 60 only 10 of us got better than a zero..  made my 16 look pretty impressive as a solid B and I took it and was happy.

All I remember was looking at the questions with no idea what to do and when we got the answers back I was like why would I ever think to use some formula used in electricity to get to the answer on gravity/friction type question when we haven't even covered that in the course yet..

like use ohms law to figure out how fast a car would roll down an incline plane.

It's all differential equations, anyway.

[Robb]

I remember a physics course at my college where in the class of 60 only 10 of us got better than a zero..  made my 16 look pretty impressive as a solid B and I took it and was happy.

All I remember was looking at the questions with no idea what to do and when we got the answers back I was like why would I ever think to use some formula used in electricity to get to the answer on gravity/friction type question when we haven't even covered that in the course yet..

like use ohms law to figure out how fast a car would roll down an incline plane.

It's all differential equations, anyway.

I don't recall a lot of undergrad, but one thing that stuck with me was Prof Torrance (heat transfer) doing a derivation from the Fourier heat  PDE to show that electricity flowing through an anisotropic medium (eg an insulated wire) is exactly the same equation, just that a ton of terms cancel out because the insulation (and surrounding air) are very nearly perfect insulators compared to the lousy thermal insulators that are available.  After you chop it all the way down, you get....Ohm's law.

[jtwcornell91]

I remember a physics course at my college where in the class of 60 only 10 of us got better than a zero..  made my 16 look pretty impressive as a solid B and I took it and was happy.

All I remember was looking at the questions with no idea what to do and when we got the answers back I was like why would I ever think to use some formula used in electricity to get to the answer on gravity/friction type question when we haven't even covered that in the course yet..

like use ohms law to figure out how fast a car would roll down an incline plane.

It's all differential equations, anyway.

I don't recall a lot of undergrad, but one thing that stuck with me was Prof Torrance (heat transfer) doing a derivation from the Fourier heat  PDE to show that electricity flowing through an anisotropic medium (eg an insulated wire) is exactly the same equation, just that a ton of terms cancel out because the insulation (and surrounding air) are very nearly perfect insulators compared to the lousy thermal insulators that are available.  After you chop it all the way down, you get....Ohm's law.

One of the classic problems in undergrad classical mechanics is the forced, damped harmonic oscillator.  To get a linear differential equation you have to add a damping term which is proportional to the velocity, which is not how the "ordinary" friction works.  So the usual story is to talk about a "dashpot" which no one has ever heard of at that point.  The thing is, you get the same equations for a driven RLC circuit, with and the resistor really does give the desired simple linear damping term.

[Robb]

I remember a physics course at my college where in the class of 60 only 10 of us got better than a zero..  made my 16 look pretty impressive as a solid B and I took it and was happy.

All I remember was looking at the questions with no idea what to do and when we got the answers back I was like why would I ever think to use some formula used in electricity to get to the answer on gravity/friction type question when we haven't even covered that in the course yet..

like use ohms law to figure out how fast a car would roll down an incline plane.

It's all differential equations, anyway.

I don't recall a lot of undergrad, but one thing that stuck with me was Prof Torrance (heat transfer) doing a derivation from the Fourier heat  PDE to show that electricity flowing through an anisotropic medium (eg an insulated wire) is exactly the same equation, just that a ton of terms cancel out because the insulation (and surrounding air) are very nearly perfect insulators compared to the lousy thermal insulators that are available.  After you chop it all the way down, you get....Ohm's law.

One of the classic problems in undergrad classical mechanics is the forced, damped harmonic oscillator.  To get a linear differential equation you have to add a damping term which is proportional to the velocity, which is not how the "ordinary" friction works.  So the usual story is to talk about a "dashpot" which no one has ever heard of at that point.  The thing is, you get the same equations for a driven RLC circuit, with and the resistor really does give the desired simple linear damping term.

Yup.  Got burned by that, too.  Didn't get around to taking my RLC circuits distribution until senior year, when I was already taking PhD level fluid mechanics courses.  Got a 100 on the first prelim, got cocky, said "I know this math" and didn't study for the second one, forgetting that it was closed book.  Hadn't had closed book exams since sophomore year!   Oops.....  Bombed that, then aced the final for a solid A-.

Wouldn't have been so bad, but the prof was my brother's masters project advisor that year, resulting in this conversation about halfway through the semester:

"So, I understand that your brother is in my circuits class this semester?"

"Well, not too often!"


Accurate, but thanks, bro!

[adamw]

it's all ball bearings nowadays