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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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"

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

[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.

Ah, redshirts

[wonkey_monkey]

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

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.