Excellence Or Disaster? A Thought Experiment On Grading, Teaching And Learning In Engineering School

This paper considers the hypothesis that engineering faculty are buying popularity and avoiding responsibility in courses, with potentially disastrous consequences for engineering education. It explores the literature on grade inflation and its relationship with the misuse of student evaluations as the sole metric of teaching and learning. It considers what has changed recently in these ancient controversies, and whether these changes that cause a mutual admiration vortex of happiness, might lead to a resonant amplification of the problem with disastrous implications for U.S. engineering education in general and aerospace engineering education in particular. It considers what individual faculty might be able to do to break the strengthening vortex.