On 11/18/09 02:10, scott wrote:
>> Sadly, here in the US it's common to have people graduating with a
>> bachelor's degree in engineering who've forgotten most of calculus
>
> Yeh see I don't think that could happen here. My course was 4 years (as
> are most Engineering degrees in the UK now), in the 1st year they
> *really* quickly skipped over all A level maths (which was the
> foundations of calculus) and then jumped on to fourier transforms (and
> friends), vector calculus and stuff. The reason for this was clear, all

	Over here, while many do it in high school, almost all engineering 
programs have up to 3 semesters of calculus in undergrad (sometimes one 
can "test out" of those if their high school education was good enough).

	I've been to both a low ranked university (undergrad) and a top 
engineering university (grad). In both places, I complained that the 
upper level (undergrad) engineering courses rarely required the students 
to be able to solve differential equations or perform integrals. The 
exception was electromagnetics, where you just can't do without them. 
And some courses would require it for calculating Fourier 
coefficients/transforms, but those weren't challenging integrals. In all 
other courses where, say, a diff eq would crop up, the professor would 
almost always say - "Let's not get distracted by the math - this is an 
engineering course. Here's the solution: You can verify it by plugging 
it back into the diff eq."

	It probably wasn't always this way.


-- 
I didn't know my husband drank until one day he came home sober.

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