> Engineering programs in the US are required by accreditation boards to have lots of lab courses. One of the primary reasons is the industry advisors on these boards want graduates to be able to build stuff.
Let me summarize almost all my engineering lab courses:
"Design and build X" where X could be some kind of amplifier, etc.
The "design" part is identical to a HW problem. You already know in advance the circuit (one of the standard ones in the textbook), and you just need to figure out R/C/L values to get the desired output. Then you build it and show it to the lab TA who'll check it is actually behaving as desired.
This isn't a good lab assignment: It's just a theory problem masquerading as a lab exercise. After the first semester, any idiot can put the circuit together on the breadboard if they already know the circuit topology.
And yes, while I was there, the accredition board actually reaccredited the program. And yes, they looked at the lab assignments we were getting.
After graduating, I visited my department a number of times, and I did give them the feedback that "your lab assignments are useless".
> And from what I've seen, it's a lot easier to get an engineering degree by being able to build stuff but struggling with the math, versus learning a bunch of math but not being able to build anything.
Definitely not the case at my university. If you struggled with the math, you'd get really poor grades. And we had a mandatory requirement to get a B in second semester circuits (and pass the final with a score of 8/12 or better). Until you did that, you were not allowed to take junior level EE courses. The labs were trivial, but the exams were tough.
The only time when not being able to build anything was a barrier was for a Senior Design assignment we all had. And lo and behold everyone either got an electronics book (notably not a textbook), or searched the Internet.
> If someone gets a CS degree but can't write a program, they either cheated their entire way through every programming assignment, or got that degree at some international university that would never be accredited here.
Eh. It's not so much that they couldn't write a program, but that they would forget the stuff fairly quickly. In my university there definitely was a fair amount of nontrivial programming required in some CS courses. But on the EE side most of the lab assignments were just trivial.
I would quibble a little with you on the EE/CS comparison (even though I'm the one who introduced it to this thread). IMO, EE is a lot broader a discipline than EE. Stuff that is considered part of EE: Electromagnetics, control theory, acoustics (believe it or not), information theory, semiconductors, signals (e.g. Fourier transforms, etc), power, electronics, and others. There are quite a few professions that fall within the aegis of electrical engineering but have little to no circuit aspect. This is less true of CS. So it is a tad bit more understandable that someone gets an EE degree but sucks at electronics.
Let me summarize almost all my engineering lab courses:
"Design and build X" where X could be some kind of amplifier, etc.
The "design" part is identical to a HW problem. You already know in advance the circuit (one of the standard ones in the textbook), and you just need to figure out R/C/L values to get the desired output. Then you build it and show it to the lab TA who'll check it is actually behaving as desired.
This isn't a good lab assignment: It's just a theory problem masquerading as a lab exercise. After the first semester, any idiot can put the circuit together on the breadboard if they already know the circuit topology.
And yes, while I was there, the accredition board actually reaccredited the program. And yes, they looked at the lab assignments we were getting.
After graduating, I visited my department a number of times, and I did give them the feedback that "your lab assignments are useless".
> And from what I've seen, it's a lot easier to get an engineering degree by being able to build stuff but struggling with the math, versus learning a bunch of math but not being able to build anything.
Definitely not the case at my university. If you struggled with the math, you'd get really poor grades. And we had a mandatory requirement to get a B in second semester circuits (and pass the final with a score of 8/12 or better). Until you did that, you were not allowed to take junior level EE courses. The labs were trivial, but the exams were tough.
The only time when not being able to build anything was a barrier was for a Senior Design assignment we all had. And lo and behold everyone either got an electronics book (notably not a textbook), or searched the Internet.
> If someone gets a CS degree but can't write a program, they either cheated their entire way through every programming assignment, or got that degree at some international university that would never be accredited here.
Eh. It's not so much that they couldn't write a program, but that they would forget the stuff fairly quickly. In my university there definitely was a fair amount of nontrivial programming required in some CS courses. But on the EE side most of the lab assignments were just trivial.
I would quibble a little with you on the EE/CS comparison (even though I'm the one who introduced it to this thread). IMO, EE is a lot broader a discipline than EE. Stuff that is considered part of EE: Electromagnetics, control theory, acoustics (believe it or not), information theory, semiconductors, signals (e.g. Fourier transforms, etc), power, electronics, and others. There are quite a few professions that fall within the aegis of electrical engineering but have little to no circuit aspect. This is less true of CS. So it is a tad bit more understandable that someone gets an EE degree but sucks at electronics.