Electrical engineering – On The 8 Spot

remember sir Ken Robinsons TED talk here, of how schools kill creativity, he says something there like “college produces college professors”, I love my professors but sometimes feel this sentiment. same with the board exams, the EE board exams produces exam takers/passers not electrical engineers. red the half of the post i didnt grab

In praise of dumbing down
Complaints about “dumbing down” have become a cliché. However, in narrow technical terms, the dumbing down of exams could be a good thing, as this recent paper explains.
The intuition is simple. Exams can only measure a subset of the skills required for most jobs. If you set tough exams, people with good skills which the exam doesn’t test will either fail or not even enter. The result is that employers who look for exam grades plus other skills will not get a pool of able candidates.
In such cases, the dumbing down of exams can help. They’ll allow those people with good but non-tested skills to now acquire credentials as well. And as these people can now get jobs ahead of good exam-passers with poor other skills, so labour productivity might improve. This would happen if the decline in average tested skills is small, relative to the improvement in average non-tested skills of the new exam-passers, or if non-tested skills are very important for job success.
It’s possible, therefore, that dumbing down can be good for the economy.
So much for theory, what of practice?
via Stumbling and Mumbling: In praise of dumbing down.

: Image via Wikipedia

I graduated from UP (University of the Philippines). In the Philippines there is really no comparison with other universities here in my country (although a few friends would definitely disagree, this is my blog so bugger off). I’d have to say that one of the major reasons that UP is different is the diversity you have when your tuition fee is worth not even half a Play Station Portable and only a handful of your science programs are not the centers of excellence of your country(Electrical Engineering program in UP is the center of excellence for EE in Phils., It’s really disheartening that a few departments have the swagger but not the chops to be the best at least in the Here and be respected elsewhere). from my own experiences a UP diploma is good enough for a middle to upper middle income household if you start from scratch, and in a lot of ways helps open doors for you. I’ve always wondered about the people who refuse to study what they really want to study in lieu of studying something because that is the course that they got into in UP. It’s probably because of this, I think that either the median income of most professions in the Philippines really fall within a narrow field and this makes where you graduate almost as important as what was your course when you graduate. Well what do I know??

Returns to good universities
New research confirms what we’ve long suspected but not quantified – that it does matter what university you attend.
This paper shows that there are significant differences in graduate earnings, depending upon the quality of university. For example, if a university has an RAE score one standard deviation above-average, its graduates earn, on average, 4% more than the average graduate. And a graduate of a top quartile university earns 10-16% more (depending on which measure of quality is used*) than a graduate of a bottom quartile institution.
These differences control for students’ A level scores and other things, and so try to correct for the fact that better universities attract better applicants.
There seems to have been a rise in these returns over time, which suggests that as university numbers have expanded, so too has the premium upon attending a better one.
via Stumbling and Mumbling: Returns to good universities.

Tag: Electrical engineering

rePost:Please Send This To All My Teachers In College hehehe:Stumbling and Mumbling: In praise of dumbing down

rePost: : Stumbling and Mumbling: Returns to good universities