I did an electrical engineering course. Especially with hardware ("welcome to tweak week"), there was a real sink or swim approach. I ended up feeling like it had to do with testability. It's easy to grade a test if you just look for right answers, and mark everything else off. It's easy to grade labs if you just look for the circuit tracking the input frequency. Grading either based on some assessment of how well the student understands what's actually happening is much, much harder.
My older brother and I went through the same classes and labs together. He brought to the table 15 years of experience playing around with electronics, so when we took labs, he had a clear sense of how to debug hardware.
He would wave his hand over some part of the circuit, and make gnomic pronouncements like, "When the input goes over about 5 volts, this part goes apeshit and starts firing back at it." Then he'd swap out a cap or a resistor, and everything would start working. I just went along for the ride.
I had decent math skills, so I did all right in the program. But I never learned that intuitive, heuristic, holistic way of grokking circuits like my brother did. Nor could I ever see that the school had any way to reward people like him, who "got" things at a deep level.
My sense was always that his approach didn't test well. If you test people for calculating the right voltage, you end up rewarding people who "plug & chug" quickly, even if they don't know what the voltage means, or why it would make some cluster of components go apeshit when it goes over about five volts.
My older brother and I went through the same classes and labs together. He brought to the table 15 years of experience playing around with electronics, so when we took labs, he had a clear sense of how to debug hardware.
He would wave his hand over some part of the circuit, and make gnomic pronouncements like, "When the input goes over about 5 volts, this part goes apeshit and starts firing back at it." Then he'd swap out a cap or a resistor, and everything would start working. I just went along for the ride.
I had decent math skills, so I did all right in the program. But I never learned that intuitive, heuristic, holistic way of grokking circuits like my brother did. Nor could I ever see that the school had any way to reward people like him, who "got" things at a deep level.
My sense was always that his approach didn't test well. If you test people for calculating the right voltage, you end up rewarding people who "plug & chug" quickly, even if they don't know what the voltage means, or why it would make some cluster of components go apeshit when it goes over about five volts.