Chemical Engineering Education, Part Two

At a large public research institute such as Penn State, it is all-too-obvious that teaching comes a distant last on the list of priorities.  Which is a real shame... what happened to the original Land Grant rationale that founded the place?

In the course of advising friends-of-friends and just talking to people casually, I come across stories like this all the time:

http://loose-screws.tumblr.com/post/1461795697/honors-programs-cannot-survive-bad-professors?ref=nf

Amen.  The clear philosophy here is that anyone who can get a PhD is automatically competent enough to teach the material covered in an undergraduate course.  As someone who spent two years teaching privately and two more teaching for the University, I am reasonably qualified to attest that this is simply not true.  Just because someone can understand something complicated does NOT mean they have the skills to effectively communicate the ideas to someone else.  If the academic hiring process isn't carefully screening for communication skills (and it is definitely not - RESEARCH GRANTS bring money and prestige to a place like this, not teaching awards), then the damage to the quality of undergraduate education is immediate and obvious.


Fact is, the PhD process teaches you nothing relevant to actually being a professor.  Having completed virtually all of the requirements for an MS in ChemE, I can attest that success in the program has nothing to do with real talent and is really only a measure of resistance to abuse.  The material covered in the 'core courses' is arbitrary and irrelevant to an extent that is actually quite amazing.

The understanding is that if you can survive the academic hazing, you're in the system... and there is essentially zero oversight from there on out.  Student evaluations like the SRTEs?  They reward the panderers who give little and ask for little in return.  Faculty teaching evaluations?  I saw you having a beer together on Friday night and you babysit eachothers' kids, so give me a break: there is no way anyone can be professionally evaluated by their best faculty buddy down the hall.

The situation is (hopefully) better at places where the undergraduate student as seen as more than just a necessary inconvenience.

Chemical Engineering Education, Part One

It occurred to me yesterday that I have no idea what the top ten bulk chemical products in the world are.  I cannot connect the common names (limestone, potash) to the most basic of chemical reagents, and I have no idea where or how they are derived.  I just barely grasp the general processes that occur in an oil refinery, and I know next to nothing about any other industrially-relevant chemical transformations.

I can recite Avogadro's Number far beyond a reasonable number of decimals, but I have no idea how the number was discovered or derived and I can't explain its significance outside of its relationship to the seemingly arbitrary definition of the 'mole'.  The same goes for the Boltzmann constant, the Faraday constant, the ideal gas constant.  I have no idea who Avogadro, Boltzmann, and Faraday where.  I have only a hazy understanding of where chemical engineering came from - arisen somehow in the leap from alchemy to industrial chemistry, tied to the Industrial Revolution and the steam engine - and this is only due to a few minutes here and there of my own efforts.

For all of the Liberal Artists endlessly beating the drum of 'general education', higher education's efforts to instill something beyond the knowledge of a handful of mathematical relationships seem to have failed outright.  A third of my education in college, and a full four-fifths pre-college, has technically been in the 'liberal arts'.  The failure began in what was NOT emphasized: how my chosen discipline connects to the real world.  The lack of history and the absence of those people and the discoveries they made robs science of it humanity and strips it of the logical progression of our understanding that makes it all make sense.  Without history, there is no foundation upon which to consider the present.  The failure ends at the feet of the Ivory Tower Intellectual, who deems it all (reality) to be too complicated and too practical, and makes the decision to leave it all out entirely... in favor of a grand meaningless molecular understanding.

So we sit around and type away at our computers and derive silly things at the atomic level, all the while remaining ignorant of the REAL chemical engineering that goes on right in front of us!

Science is a story of the most improbable happenings and the people who made them happen, and it is a story that continues to the present.  To deny the connections science has with the real world is to turn away from practicality, applicability, usefulness.  The drive for academic prestige (a synonym for 'complete irrelevance') has enabled the Ivory Tower Intellectual to move in on the discipline - even at the good old Land Grant universities, which have pledged from the beginning to serve the people by ensuring that knowledge is applied.

If Chemical Engineering wishes to avoid becoming a wanna-be Chemistry, the philosophy with which it is taught must change.  Every course must be organized from general to specific, providing the real-world context to keep students' interest and attention.  Every course needs to start with the history: where did all of this come from?  How and why was it discovered?  Who discovered it?

Give Newton and Leibniz a rest - analytical mathematics is NOT the future of this discipline.  Invite Johannn Becher to pull up a chair instead, and perhaps we'll all learn a thing or two.

Anatomy of an Exam

Yesterday, I took the least satisfying exam I have ever had the misfortune of encountering.  (Note that this isn't a case of sour grapes on my part; I scored fine, and my cumulative marks are safely in the 'good range'.)

The Content
Some of the questions on this 25-question, multiple-choice molecular genetics final included:

Q: "Which domain(s) recognize(s) methylated histone tails?"
a) Chromo domains    b) Bromo domains     c) Both Chromo and Bromo domains

Q: "Yeast Gal4 is one of the most well-characterized transcription factors in eukaryotes. What type of activating region does Gal4 have?"
a) Gln-rich region      b) Acidic region      c) Pro-rich

Q: "6S RNA in E. coli cells downregulates gene expression in the stationary phase.  What protein is the target for 6S RNA binding?"
a) Large ribosomal subunit    b) Sigma70 RNA polymerase holoenzyme    c) Aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase

The answers are a, a, and... it doesn't matter; the minutiae addressed in this exam are completely irrelevant to understanding the course topic, to the point of this being discernible to someone unaffiliated with the biological sciences.  The professor has wasted his one opportunity to determine whether students understood the important concepts covered in the course, in favor of testing for the ability to memorize thousands of unrelated facts.  Asking questions such as these in molecular biology is akin to testing a geography student on their ability to match countries with their capitol cities, instead of on their knowledge of, say, geography's effects on the development of civilization.  This only reinforces my suspicion that many professors do not know what the main concepts are in the courses that they are assigned to teach.  This is probably a side-effect of the extremely narrow focus of most professors' research.

The Format
Exam format is also at issue.  Four multiple choice, 25-question exams are the only method of evaluation in this 400-level junior/senior class.  While I understand that this is partially due to the course's size (120+ students), this limitation does not prevent the questions themselves from being much better than they are.  All 25 questions had only three possible answers, turning the whole affair into something of a stochastic crapshoot.  It's not like we pay a lot for this or anything.  I really hope this professor is a class-A researcher.

With such a simple format, proofreading also would have been fairly straightforward and much appreciated:
     "Answer which one determines the copy number of plasmid."
     a) an origin of replication      b) selection marker      c) multiple clorning site

It's Not That Hard
Writing decent exam questions that actually address concepts is not difficult; as an unpaid undergraduate TA last spring, I came up with:

"In the DNA, G can be converted to 8-oxo-G and 5-methyl-C to T by various biochemical mechanisms.  What is a 'failsafe glycosylase'?  How would you design a failsafe glycosylase to address the two base conversions described above?"

"Consider the structure of RNA versus that of DNA.  How do their structural differences reflect their different functions in the cell?"

"The Gibbs free energy is used to evaluate the thermodynamics of biochemical transformations in living organisms.  How is this thermodynamic potential an appropriate choice for this application?"

"The partial hydrolysis of a nucleotide triphosphate into a nucleotide monophosphate and a pyrophosphate is only moderately favorable (X kJ/mol), while the hydrolysis of pyrophosphate is more favorable (Y kJ/mol).  How does a difference of (Y-X) kJ/mol influence the equilibrium position of these reactions?  Why is this important in the process of DNA synthesis?"

The topics of these questions have a lot of overlap with the material covered in this molecular genetics course, and I think they're sufficient to illustrate the point.

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So what do you think: do I have a point here?
Why is it so hard to get your money's worth at a university these days?