Task Force on the Engineering Core Curriculum
Objectives, principles, and proficiencies for faculty comment
For purposes of the Task Force and for this document, the “core curriculum” is the collection of courses that is required of all engineering students, regardless of major. While these courses are concentrated in the first year, they are nonetheless spread across the four-years of the typical undergraduate plan of study.
● Provide students with the fundamental training, development, skills, and experiences that prepare them to excel as professionals.
● Consolidate technical and professional proficiencies shared by our several engineering disciplines to be taught by experts in those fields.
● Instill in students an engineering mindset that includes a systematic, strategic approach to design and to problem-solving.
● Prepare students for entry into specific engineering fields.
Delivery of the core curriculum should be based on the following principles:
Diversity and equity are reflected in these principles (i.e. integrated, engaging, equitable, affirming, inclusive).
The below-listed proficiencies define what all engineering students should learn, not how they should learn it, nor in what classes they should be learned.
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Comments are due March 26, 2019 12:00
One alternative would be to impose some requirements on the departments rather than trying to do it all in a common core set of courses. An area where I have seen this idea used successfully is in teaching writing. Many schools have a writing requirement that includes a higher-level writing-intensive course in the major. My experience teaching writing courses in Chemical Engineering has shown me the advantage to teaching these things in a subject the students genuinely care about.
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Do we also want to prepare them to be members of society who can contribute outside their professional roles?
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I would like to see something here that includes expecting our students to think about how the engineering decisions they make impact humans, including both what problems they decide to work on, and what factors they prioritize and consider in solving them.
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We have had BME students request there to be better integration. We would be successful in our integration of ethics if our students were just as likely at the end of their degree to say they wished to be an engineer to help people as they were at the beginning of their degree. We would also be successful if we saw them choosing relevant projects in their capstones to having a positive impact on society.
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While I understand the value of holistic instruction, I also note that it tends toward either brittleness (high interdependence of courses) or a combination of overlapping and missed topics between courses. There is also a tendency for holistic instruction to result in cognitive overload for students (and thus overall instructional failure) as instructors expect them to keep many new-to-the-student ideas in their heads at one time.
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The items listed under Math and Science seem to be there because they are traditional. Is there a justification for choosing these topics other than tradition? Many of the topics listed are not widely used in all branches of engineering, and topics that are widely used and of broad general value are not included. It would be helpful if the committee explained the reasoning behind this list to understand why particular areas are included or not included.
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We shouldn’t be including things just because they are traditional, but neither should we be dismissing things because they are old. There are a bunch of things here that are not current SEAS requirements (though often they are required by specific majors – Differential Equations is a good example of that). I’d be interested in hearing what specific things of broad general value are missing from the list.
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In my work (both research and classes I’ve taught), I have never had a need to use Chemistry, and have very occasionally had a need to use Physics (but nothing beyond what students would typically learn in elementary school). Much more common to use Economics, Environmental Sciences, Cognitive Science, Politics, etc. I appreciate that these are not part of traditional engineering education, but more relevant to many engineers than, say Chemistry, is.
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Some of these we could fit into our existing STS or ENGR courses – for example I teach engineering economic analysis in my ENGR 1624 section.
The biggest puzzle for me on the list is ‘environmental science,’ even though that is very close to my own work. I’d want to teach that in a way that builds on college-level math, physics, chemistry, and biology.
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While I think we can and should go beyond what ABET sets as the minimum, we clearly want to meet their basic standards. (Not that everything has to be done in the Core.)
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Some of the math courses listed here are also required by our ABET accreditation standards for engineering programs and/or computing programs. But not all that are listed are required. The committee (which does not appear to have a great deal of expertise on accreditation) should be cognizant of these requirements for each program.
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It would be a problem if we left things they require off our list.
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Now I am curious – let’s say you develop the software for a self-driving bicycle, don’t you need to talk to the mechanical engineer or physicist designing other parts to make sure your software is viable and solves the pertinent problem? This would require some basic idea what the other person is talking about – from both sides, right?
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Even grads who will not regularly use one or more of these fields in their daily work should be expected to have the kind of broad technical literacy given by college-level study of these subjects.
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…and most engineering disciplines need proficiency in few if any of these.
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Most engineering disciplines need at only one of these. Software engineering doesn’t even need one. Gaining proficiency in all three seems like overkill to me.
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Engineering programs (including software engineering) that are accredited by EAC of ABET require “basic science” with experimentation. Old standards required chemistry & physics specifically but that is not true any more.
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Details of things like cost estimation are of course discipline-specific, but everyone ought to know the basics of time value of money, return on investment, and so forth.
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It isn’t clear to me what is meant by this. Many engineering curricula specify a certain amount of laboratory work, often going beyond the little labs associated with the core science requirements.
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Sitting in this paragraph as part of the design process cycle, I imagine it as a placeholder for the ‘build’ in design-build-test, and it could mean anything from folding paper airplanes in an intro class to using CVD to make microelectronic components. If this is meant to imply something specific like learning 3-D printing techniques, that should be spelled out.
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Popsicle-stick bridges are a standard grade-school design activity. At a higher level, many 1624 sections design cantilever trusses in CAD, use the built-in stress analysis features, and also 3-D print them and test to failure.
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Nor computer engineering
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Most ChemEs don’t need to make full 3-D drawings, but we sure need to be able to make Process Flow Diagrams, Piping and Instrument Diagrams and other visual communications most easily made through software. I wish students in my capstone design course could make the required figures with a lot less effort.
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Spatial reasoning is a major factor in all engineering field performance (see, e.g. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500690802595839 and https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-015-9304-8) and without including it in the core is disproportionately present in those who engaged in spatial play as children, which in our culture is far more likely to be boys whose parents had money.
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Ethics is indeed an important topic, and standards of conduct, should go with the development of liablity, rules and regulations. Kantianism and consequentialism (which in the sake of full disclosure I had to look up ) seem more higher level models of ethics. How would teach all of these? Are we teaching them right now?
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I approve of ethics, but why virtue ethics, consequentialism, and kantianism instead of any of the many others? For example, rational egoism seems to me a valuable theory for understanding emergent corporate behavior and policy making; collectivism and social contract for understanding workplace issues; etc.
Note I’m not proposing a different list; I’m hoping we either remove the list altogether or clarify why this list was chosen.
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This list feels oddly specific, given the vagueness of items like ‘probability’ above.
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I agree completely with Eric here. This is getting down to the level of a syllabus.
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I think Research and learning skills are not necessarily part of leadership. All engineers should know something about research, whether they are planning on being a project leader or not. All researchers are not leaders. “Metacognition?”
Another point, does this refer to a research paper? Or a laboratory/computational research experience? I think both are important, but it is not clear what the focus of this section is.
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These core ideas cut across all the disciplines, and right now we don’t do much to formally teach them. Lots of students learn what can go wrong if you ignore these thing the hard way during the capstone projects, but it would be much better to give them a chance to apply the ideas successfully.
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ii. Licenses, NDAs, and contracts
iii. Patentability
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I see my BME students starving for understanding what possible career paths are there? How do these paths impact their trajectory between their personal and professional lives? I think it would be great to specify what mentoring is with this regard. How will they see or meet or hear experiences from people in their profession that have already navigated this.
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To me, mentoring and networking are two sides of the same coin. I think what is missing from the career management section is something that conveys “self-assessment”: students learning to reflect on their own interests, values and skills, and then using those insights to chart a career path that is uniquely theirs. This skill is critical to lifelong career success.
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It surprises me the extent to which some of our students go through 4 years here without having a good grasp of what they are good at, or even sometimes a grasp of what they enjoy.
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SEAS pays for access to one of the commonly used assessments that companies use to determine strengths “StrengthsFinder”. Out of 100 students I asked, none had used this self-assessment. This seems unwise, particularly when the process can include how future employers might be determining your worth/strength through these types of interventions.
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The career services profession has moved away from using the word, “placement”, as it connotes a “doing” on the part of career services staff and a passivity on behalf of the student. In contrast, we “empower” students to design their careers through helping them understand themselves and the world of work, and by providing them with the tools and resources to be successful in navigating their career. We want them to learn career management skills for life, not simply find their first job after graduation.
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General Document Comments 0
It is hard to identify things in this proposal that are different from what would have been done 20, 30, or 40 years ago. What are the changes that are motivating a new core curriculum, and how are they reflected in this proposal? Or, is the goal just to document and justify what we are currently doing?
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I am concerned that the committee lacks diversity. One woman on the committee? No students? No one from STS?
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We all know (or at least we say) that a diverse team comes up with better solutions. Clearly if we really believed that, we’d put together a diverse team INTENTIONALLY rather than just saying “well this is what we got using the tried (and failed) method of asking dept chairs for reps”. Remember that the department chairs are all white men and have been for years. They are not going to give you a diverse team.
The team is not REPRESENTATIVE if it is almost all white men and no students.
And no one from STS who contribute a vital part of the core education?
Someone defined the criteria for forming this task force. Whoever it is, failed to consider diversity. My guess is that it was a white man.
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