2/27/2007

That’s pretty dumb
Filed under: Stupidity — nobrainer @ 10:52 pm

I just had a second (maybe even third) year engineering student ask me, during a quiz I was proctoring, what the conversion between degrees and radians is.

For you non-engineers, I don’t know which dumb question that relates to in your life, but for engineering students that’s a ridiculously stupid question for someone at that level.

Not only should the student know that conversion from experience and practice, the student should have have been able to think through the conversion. “How many degrees in a circle? 360. How many radians in a circle? 2 pi. Ergo, 360 degrees equals 2 pi radians. Ta da!”

collapse Agent Orange Says:
February 28th, 2007 at 3:07 pm

And here I was trying to solve the problem using the right hand rule……with my left hand.

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collapse Doug Stewart Says:
February 28th, 2007 at 5:14 pm

I had a similar experience in college, albeit from the other side of the teaching podium. We had recently started doing AC circuits in my Intro to Electrical Engineering course and, as happens when you have a mathematical system in which the square root of -1 has to be represented, we had to use a substitute variable whenever dealing with AC circuits. In order to avoid confusion, sqrt(-1), which is usually represented as “i”, is represented as “j” (since “I” is used for current in most EE equations and “i” is for inductance, if I remember correctly…).

We had been at AC circuits for roughly 3 weeks when our professor was writing an example equation up oin the board. One of my cohorts raised his hand mid-equation and said “Excuse me, what’s ‘j’ stand for?” The professor turned around slowly and gave him one of the coldest stares I have ever seen in my entire life, turned silently back around and resumed writing her equation. The sniggering that commenced among that unfortunate soul’s classmates lasted for a good 5 minutes or so.

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collapse Wha Says:
March 1st, 2007 at 10:40 pm

I flushed that knowledge out a few years ago. Who uses radians anyway…douche bags.

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collapse Jeremy Says:
March 2nd, 2007 at 12:59 pm

I couldn’t for the life of me remember what a “radian” was until the end of your post…and I used to be a math geek.

Stupid medical school–flushed everything useful out of my brain.

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