New 'Academic Redshirt' For Engineering Undergrads at UW

vinces99 writes "Redshirting isn't just for athletes anymore. The University of Washington and Washington State University are collaborating on an 'academic redshirt' program that will bring dozens of low-income Washington state high school graduates to the two universities to study engineering in a five-year bachelor's program. The first year will help those incoming freshmen acclimate to university-level courses and workload and prepare to major in an engineering discipline."

Comments

So... they get eaten by the salt vampire?

[Kenja]

I just picture some low income student showing up in a red shirt to a room full of grinning SOBs in yellow and blue.

Re:So... they get eaten by the salt vampire?

[iluvcapra]

Not the TVTropes Red Shirt*. The other kind.

*by which we mean "Gold Jumpsuit" to those of us who hold to the TNG/DS9 Order of Things

Re:So... they get eaten by the salt vampire?

[Salgak1]

Well, considering the pass rate through Freshman Calc in the Engineering/Science track was only ~60% when **I** was an undergrad in the early 1980s. . . Academic or not, they're Redshirts EITHER way. . . .

Re:So... they get eaten by the salt vampire?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I suspect that it depends on what you mean by 'under-qualified'.

Given that it is a specially designed, five-year, program, with the first year for remedial purposes, it obviously isn't targeting people with good high school educations.

However, such a program(with its willingness to accept students who went to shitty high schools) would presumably be very well placed to have its pick of talented students whose high schools sucked.

It remains to be seen if they will adopt sufficiently well refined selection criteria; but given the state of a nontrivial number of high schools, there should be plenty of people out there who aren't nearly prepared for a real college; but who have considerable aptitude.

Re:So... they get eaten by the salt vampire?

[Peter Simpson]

Ugh...the only two C's in my undergraduate career were in Engineering Math I & II. It was the damn proofs.

//Paradoxically, I did well in Discrete Math and Coding Theory...

Re:So... they get eaten by the salt vampire?

[cayenne8]

In a word: maybe. In more than one word: it will displace students who have it way too fucking easy, with wealthy parents to glide them through their life ensuring that by the time they reach 18 they have mastered exactly one thing: relying on mom and dad (and maybe stepdad).

Well, first...I think most people that are going to be dependent on Mom and Dad (let's take only the super wealthy ones you are implying), aren't really going to need to be working terribly hard to make good grades to be qualified for college.

I'm talking strictly about academically qualified students, regardless of class of upbringing. Sure, everyone in life starts at different levels of life, different levels of caring parents, fiscal issues, regions of country ,and just plain old luck in life.

Everyone is born with a different set of cards both by living standards and genetics. Fact of life, nothing can be done about that. Some people have to work MUCH harder than other to achieve the same goals.

If someone is either unlucky, or didn't see fit to embrace and actually fight for a good education, should they be given precedence over the luckier student that did work and learn and earn good academic credentials?

Does everyone deserve a college education? Does everyone need one? Is it true that the world needs ditch diggers too?

I don't know all the answers, but I do pose the questions. I do often have difficulty believing and accepting that just because someone has a worst starting spot in life, and didn't make the extra effort to make up for it, they should be given an exception or have standards lowered for competition for any position, academic or otherwise.

I think it boils down to life is tough, and you have to do the best with the cards you are dealt with in life.

Re:So... they get eaten by the salt vampire?

[siwelwerd]

Funny, my math department has to offer dumbed down (i.e. remove most proofs) courses for the engineers, e.g. Matrix Analysis instead of Linear Algebra. Our engineers don't hardly have to know what a proof is.

Re:So... they get eaten by the salt vampire?

[KernelMuncher]

If the university lowered graduation standards for some students, there would be a taint on the degree. But this case is just the opposite - it's holding the standards high but giving extra help to talent students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds. All of the graduates will still have passed the same courses as in previous years.

Re:So... they get eaten by the salt vampire?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It's hard to say, from the data I have, whether this is some sort of 'equity' thing, or whether it's a strategic choice to gain access to a more talented student body than they would otherwise be able to attract. Consider the analogy of on the job training and applicant experience: Somebody who went to a crap high school is essentially an inexperienced 'hire'. Somebody who went to a good or excellent one has more relevant experience. Would a company ever consider hiring the less experienced one? Sure, if he were cheaper, or seemed smarter, or both, and they were willing to invest upfront to get what they expected to be a better employee. Would they ever consider hiring the more experienced one? Obviously, he's presumably closer to being up to speed, and his performance more predictable based on past experience.

University of Washington, per US News, is modestly selective, 58.4% of applicants admitted. Washington State is less selective, 82.5% acceptance. Few schools play in the single-digit-acceptance leagues; but neither figure, especially Washington State, is suggestive of a school that has its pick of whatever students it wants. Hard to say without more data; but it's certainly within the realm of plausible that they suspect the existence of students who are just plain sharper than some of the ones it currently has; but which it can access because competing schools aren't interested in doing the remedial work.

(Presumably, it also comes down to your position on the relative worth of preparation vs. raw talent. If you suspect much of high school of being dubiously useful babysitting, of only limited relevance to your curriculum, you are really only treating it as a signalling mechanism for talent. If you think it is of considerable use, then you are making a much greater sacrifice in taking on people whose high school years are shot.)

Re:So... they get eaten by the salt vampire?

[neurovish]

Why should they? Engineers are on the application side of things....they use the existing tools (equations) to build other things. They don't need to know exactly how the tools work as long as they can be trusted to work. The only courses I had that were proof intensive were on the more pure math side of things, linear algebra and number theory, that I took because they sounded interesting and useful. There were some proofs mentioned during lecture for the calc -> diff. eq. and a couple of numerical courses, but we were never tested on them.

Re:So... they get eaten by the salt vampire?

[siwelwerd]

Why should they? Engineers are on the application side of things....they use the existing tools (equations) to build other things. They don't need to know exactly how the tools work as long as they can be trusted to work.

Teaching students how to do proofs teaches them an abstract way of thinking that is universally applicable to solving open ended problems--problems of the form "Here's point A. Point B is over there. How do we get there?". Not every engineer needs this kind of thinking, but some do, and the best will benefit from it. Some of the greatest engineering feats came from attacking these sorts of problems: "Here we are on Earth. There's the moon. Go put a man on it."

If you just want to write iPhone apps, you can probably skip the good math classes, but if you want to really learn how to think, take as much as you can. Saying an engineer won't need these kinds of thinking skills because you don't have a specific application in mind for them is the same short-sighted thinking as saying we shouldn't fund basic research if we don't have a clear application in mind before the research is done.

Re:So... they get eaten by the salt vampire?

[Obfuscant]

Teaching students how to do proofs teaches them an abstract way of thinking that is universally applicable to solving open ended problems--problems of the form "Here's point A. Point B is over there. How do we get there?". Not every engineer needs this kind of thinking, but some do,...

Much more important is that they need to know how the tools WORK and not just what data goes in and comes out. If you don't know how the tools work and what their limiations are, then you can easily get garbage out because you've violated some of the assumptions made in that tool.

It's one thing to know the simplified equation for doing something, but much more important to know HOW it was simplified and WHAT was left out getting there. Oh, you want to deal with the specific thing that this equation ignores, but you think you should use that equation anyway?

A perfect example of this is from chemistry dealing with pH of buffer solutions based on the pKa of the buffer. There is a simple equation that you can use to determine the pH. BUT if the buffer dissociates more than a certain amount, that equation is not applicable and you must use the full quadratic equation to get the answer. If you don't realize the limits on the simple version, you don't know when your answer is going to be garbage. You think being wrong is unusual? I even caught the TA for a chemistry class who was TEACHING us these equations using the wrong one, on a quiz, when he marked my full quadratic answer as wrong. (The full quadratic answer is ALWAYS right, it's just more complicated than the simple one.)

How about oceanography? Is your wave model based on the mild slope equations and you've got discontinuities? Are you in shallow water so you use the shallow water approximation? Are you in a region where diffraction is important and the tool you are using ignores it?

If you don't know the limitations of a hammer, every problem is a nail.

Here's how it went.

[Anonymous Coward]

College administrator #1: How can we get 5 years of tuition payments from students in exchange for a 4 year degree?
College administrator #2: How about making them stay longer? We can call it 'academic redshirt.' By likening it to something we do for athletes, it'll make it much more saleable!
College administrator #1: Fucking brilliant! Here, have a raise! You've earned it!

Re:Here's how it went.

[cervesaebraciator]

These are poor students; they're not paying their own tuition anyway, and they tend to drop out because they're behind in math and other subjects. This is a a remedial year to make up for the poor college prep they got from their low-income schools and families.

Okay.

College administrator #1: How can we get 5 years of Pell Grants, student loan money, and cash from the NSF from students in exchange for a 4 year degree?
College administrator #2: How about making them stay longer? We can call it 'academic redshirt.' By likening it to something we do for athletes, it'll make it much more saleable!
College administrator #1: Fucking brilliant! Here, have a raise! You've earned it!

Better?

(I should say, in spite of the cynicism I share with GP, this doesn't sound like a bad deal for the students.)

Re:Redshirts

[MrNickname]

See, never RTFA. Completely shattered my perception that they would all just die in their first year.

Oblig Star Trek (TOS)

[stevegee58]

Weren't Red Shirts the Enterprise crew members that were always killed within 60 seconds of their appearance?

misuse of the term redshirt

[Anonymous Coward]

An athletic "redshirt" means you get to practice with the team but you're not allowed to compete, and it doesn't count as a year of eligibility.

Are they saying that you get to audit all of your classes as a freshman and then take them for real the next year? If not, then they're probably misusing the term redshirt. If so, then it's "welcome to whose degree is it anyway? the major where everything is made up and the grades don't matter"

Re:misuse of the term redshirt

[Perl-Pusher]

Knowledge means nothing if you can't apply it or measure it. Since they are "low income", I would think the true goal is not being "low income". Who is going to hire someone who didn't get good grades but assures you they know a lot? What I worry more about is that they will dumb down the curriculum so they get a high pass rate and everyone has a feel good moment. Until the newly trained "engineers" can't hack it in the working world. As a general rule, if you give someone something, they won't put as much effort as they do when they are paying for it themselves. It doesn't apply to everyone but for example go to most government subsidized housing and count how many are actually maintaining and caring for the home.

Did the PR flack check who reads SlashDot...

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Did the PR flack check who reads SlashDot before they posted something about "red shirts?" I'll bet we have more people who care about the Bajorans than the Trojans here...

Some advice

[CCarrot]

Just a word of advice to these engineering redshirts; stay well away from the laser lab...and the biology lab, for that matter.

Really, just don't go there. In fact, try to stay out of those buildings altogether...and make sure everyone knows your last name. :p

MOD PARENT UP PLEASE!

[billstewart]

Thanks for the explanation; many of us here only know the Star Trek definition of red shirt :-)

Good idea

[siwelwerd]

Sounds like a good idea to me. I work at a large flagship state school, and we see a number of underprepared students admitted. The problem is not so much that we can't teach them what they need to catch up, it's that they are given unrealistic expectations. The College of Arts and Sciences is making a big push to have everyone finish in 4 years, but this is very unrealistic for these underprepared students. A program where everyone expects them to take an extra year would reset the expectations to a realistic level and, in my opinion, probably improve performance.

By the way, "underprepared" often includes students who have, for example, passed pre-calculus, but did not learn the material and thus struggle when I see them in calculus. It's well established that the best predictor of success in calculus is algebra/pre-calculus skills, so giving them a chance to sharpen these skills with less time pressure would be beneficial to the student.

Re:Good idea

[mjr167]

Alternately, why don't we teach the kids in high school the things they need to learn in high school so they aren't playing catch up when they go to college?

If the skills are valuable, why do we keep pushing them further down the line? If each grade level / course is expected to impart a certain level of proficiency on the students, why do we pass them if they are not proficient? If you passed pre-calc, you should have some level of proficiency with the material. Otherwise, why did you bother? What is the point of being able to say "I passed pre-calc!" if it does not imply a baseline proficiency sufficient to move on to calculus?

Re:Good idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, that's the point of a community college... not the point of a university. If students are not prepared for the rigor of an undergraduate in engineering or science, then they should take a year or two to take basic classes at the local community college until they are ready. They should not be lowering the level of classes, or taking away time from professors to support these classes.

Re:Good idea

[siwelwerd]

Alternately, why don't we teach the kids in high school the things they need to learn in high school so they aren't playing catch up when they go to college?

Nobody is arguing that we shouldn't try and prepare everyone well before they get to college, but the simple fact is that we (at the universities) get these underprepared students every year, and that is unlikely to change soon. Rather than just throw blame at others and tell them to fix it, this is a proactive approach: what can *we* (at the universities) do about this problem? We'll all be ecstatic when K-12 education improves to make this a moot point, but until then we shouldn't just ignore the problem.

Re:Good idea

[siwelwerd]

I tend to agree with you. But as a faculty member, I don't get any say in what goes on in K-12, or which students are admitted to college. All I get a say in is what to do with the students that do show up on campus. And this kind of program seems like something faculty members can do to better educate those students we do get.

I do agree, we need to bring the K-12 standards up, but that's a political game that has to be solved in a way approved by the teachers' unions and the state legislatures. At least at universities, we are more (but not completely) immune to the whims of politicians.

Ah, redshirts

[wonkey_monkey]

The away team will consist of myself, Commander Spock, Doctor McCoy, and Ensign Ricky.

In Star Trek TOS...

[CosaNostra Pizza Inc]

Aren't the red shirts the ones who always die first?

Re:College isn't for education.

[Salgak1]

Well, back at my old school, we had three tracks for Calc: "HMSS", aimed at the Arts-n-crafts and Business majors (literally, Humanities, Management, and Social Science): 4 semesters, nothing more that double integrals. The "Standard" track, for Engineering and Science students: 3 semesters, through triple integrals and polar coordinates, and the Braniac Track, the Standard Track in a 2-semester course. The problem, as **I** see it, is the societal urge to send everyone to college. That, at least in my opinion, is a mistake. We have a serious lack of people in the skilled trades and technician roles, and this need will grow as more mundane manufacturing and even office tasks are automated out of existence. For example: Sysadmins and Network Engineers would likely be better served by a mostly-hands on curriculum, but with other crucial skills like programming and breaking tasks down into individual actions. I speak as a guy with a Bachelor's, Masters, and about half of my Ph.D done: degrees for all too many skills are really just HR differentiators and proof you can accomplish long and complex tasks, with some direction. . .

Re:College isn't for education.

[fiziko]

WTF?!?! Are we here to get an education or be weeded out?

Weeded out.

Only in most institutions, not all. Look at the way marks are determined to find out. Marking on the curve is good for weeding students out, homogenizing professor performance, and not much else. If you find an institution that marks with criterion-referenced grading, then it's far more likely to be about education. Granted, this is a rule of thumb that only works for the top level of the food chain, and you can find exceptions to this idea very easily, but it's a start.

I get it!

[uvajed_ekil]

So they turned a 4-year program into a 5-year program, with all 5 years at full price, I presume. If you need a year to acclimate freshmen, you either aren't doing it right, or you have the wrong students. Are the low-income target students dumber than high-income students? God help the low-income students when they leave school not only with bigger loans than their classmates, but now also an extra year's worth of debt.

Washington

[DarthVain]

is just blatantly saying that the poor are expendable now?