Things Engineers Like: Curves
It's Monday! Some would call it the worst day of the week, I call it the best! It's the first day of the work week after a relaxing weekend! What a truly fabulous feeling. And to make it better for everyone, "Things Engineers Like" posts come out on Mondays! (Not like it needed to get better though)
As an engineer, I learned to love curves. Of course, I adore beautiful curves on the female body but that's not what I'm not talking about. I'm also not talking about the curves of the male engineer's body, or maybe the lack of (I blame that to the lack of exercise due to heavy coursework. I'm not included in this group! Just look at the curves on my glasses.).
The curves that engineers fancy (maybe the most?) are curves that help them. I'm talking about curves on grades especially on exams/final grades. All students enjoy curves on exams but engineers learn to embrace (Sometimes more than just embrace) it more than other students. With the dropout rates sky-high (I'm gonna touch the sky?) in engineering, there's no surprise that curves on the grade are crucial to the few remaining engineers.
What other majors can you find grades curving an entire letter grade or sometimes two? From my experience and hearing from others, no other major seems to have such monstrous curves (I'm still talking about grades here)? Student of other majors admire the curves of engineering but they don't know the misery and pain we go through before permitting it. Well, for most engineers...
With exam grades sometimes averaging less than 25, the curve is a necessity for the survival for many (Not me though!). In most cases, it's not that the students don't know the material; It's usually that the exam, the professor created, is used to challenge the engineers. It's a method to teach engineers that not everything will come easy and you'll have to think outside of the average problem set to solve problems. Sometimes, I feel the exams are made so tough so it'll fail engineers that have never (or hardly ever) failed anything before. Maybe the professors just like to keep the engineers' egos down since they are usually through the roof! Seriously though, the exams teach us that failure is inevitable, you just have to get back up fast and work harder to find that solution. This was probably one of the most significant lessons I learned at UConn.
While the curves may help engineers get through college, only the strong engineers come out at the end. Personally I didn't look at the grade after the curve, I looked at the original grade. I figured out what I could have done better and challenged myself to do better next time (Even if I did well). One thing more students need to recognize and learn is that grades on exams/assignments are not a competition but a contest with yourself. It's something I had to adjust to during college; I learned to use others to motivate myself but didn't judge if I did well based on other students' grades. This was probably the reason for my immense (if you can call it that) success at UConn. You need to strive for the best that you can possibly do. As Kobe says, you have to adapt, attack fast, and attack strong!
Oh how I miss the talks of how big the curves are, or better yet how big different people expect the curve to be. Oh, the college days! Appreciate curves for what they are!