Worcester Polytechnic Institute - Peddler Yearbook (Worcester, MA)

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Anderson: I give a good one and so I get maybe 15 kids — so it ' s not a total loss . . . Grogan: Then we had the competency Exam which was for aca- demic credibility . . . Roadstrom: People complain about the unevenness of Projects. There is a great unevenness in Compe- tency Exams . . . and it hurts students ... If he gets a problem he knows something about (or has thought about before) he ' s in luck. Even the really good student doesn ' t know ev- erything. Bridgeman: It isn ' t intended to be and we certainly don ' t try to make it a comprehensive Exam. It does serve a very useful purpose in bringing to- gether an evaluation of the overall work. The problem . . . the student doesn ' t have enough experience in that type of work. It ' s still a rather unique experience. He is given a prob- lem and sent out to collect information and put it together and draw some de- ductions from it. If you try to learn courses on that basis you would teach a methodology — a technique — but you wouldn ' t be able to cover as much ground. Wagner: Now . . . the system isn ' t working as well as it should . . . you get people who are flunking and flunking and they pass some until finally they pass enough to take the Competency, and they flunk the Competency and eventually out here at the end of D term we have all the people that have flunked. It is truly difficult to be absolute when you have all the people that have flunked. Bolz: More experience with the Competency is going to perfect it as an instrument for learning as well as evaluation and to insure that our graduates have the kind of competen- cy that professionals should have. The whole philosophical idea is not to come to this school for a point average — not to come to pass courses — but to come to really develop the competency expected of a profession- al. Anderson: I would prefer a diff- erent grading system — I ' d like more pigeon holes to put these guys in. I think a guy should stand on what he did — if he doesn ' t do it then some- body should be telling him he didn ' t do it ... In the good old days they used to have a hundred pigeon holes to put people in. Wagner: I believe that there is a B category person and 1 feel strongly about that person. It gives a person . . . something to strive for. If he can ' t get the AD he may not strive as hard. 10 . . . What the hell — the AC is very broad — I ' ll just sit back and do enough to get by . . .1 really feel that if you go out in that world out there and you flop-off you ' ll get yourself an F — you ' re not going to be an NR. I think you ' d better be trained for it here and face the music here. You ' ll never find in any one of those four booklets the words relevant, meaningful, viable and none of that educa- tional bullshit. There isn ' t any of it in there and we didn ' t use those words when we talked ... — Roy Seaberg Roy Seaburg

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jective is to serve the world so it ' s an IQP. Wagner: Right within our de- partment we generally have a . . . strong, active, good feeling about the MQP. I don ' t think that ' s shared on the IQP. I ' d like to know the worth — I ' m talking about three good, heavy subjects. I think three subjects . . . are much better for the engineers . . . Heventhal: While not all faculty believe it is worth their time to become involved in projects far outside their specialties, it is in this realm, on the mall, so to speak, between the two towers, where some of our inventive students will learn most. Bridgeman: good. ' I think the idea is Bolz: . . . we are trying to make a serious effort to . . . raise the stu- dents consciousness of the social im- plications of technology . . . We think, that people learn best by doing something that is challenging where you get below the surface of the sub- ject and become deeply involved. Heventhal: The student still learns writing, terms of discipline, his- tory, (and) literary approaches from the one area. Bridgeman: I ' m not so sure I think I would like to see a broader ap- Bolz: We think, that people learn best by doing something that is challenging — where you get below the surface of the subject . . . We feel . . . that such probing has later im- plications for stimulating lifelong learning. If you gain motivation then you have all of your life to become broadly educated. Anderson: I think that ' s (In- tersesion) a waste of time. I can go to a girl ' s trade school if I want to bake or sew or ballroom dancing. Bolz: Those seven weeks are pretty intense and you need breaks if you ' re going to do your best . . . as an undergraduate it ' s fun to sit in on . . . discussions or learn things about a subject for the sheer joy of learning. Maybe you want to know a little As- tronomy . . . . . . most seniors take negli- gible courses in the C and D terms of senior year. Add to that the course equivalent of the IQP and MQP — that ' s a year ' s work. There are many technical electives that the man should have to be a good operating engineer when he gets out of here. — Bob Wag- ner proach than the more concentrated one. The IQP would be very special- ized . . . the sufficiency might be more advantageous to get a broader type ex- perience than . . . almost making a liberal arts major out of a little area without having a broader background to draw on. Wagner: We used to say the en- gineer was narrow. Now he ' s narrow in two places — he ' s narrow in his sufficiency and he ' s narrow in his par- ticular field of engineering. .

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Bolz: Distinction tells a student that . . . the faculty member thinks the student has accomplished the ob- jectives of the course in a distin- guished way. Van Alstyne: For off-campus projects seven weeks is about the right amount of time. Bridgeman: We had more flexi- bility in presentation under the semes- ter system. We find in Chemistry that laboratories are very difficult thing to work into the seven-week format. I think it ' s more the inflexibility of the one-third unit that creates a problem than the seven-week term as such ... I think there ' s something to digestion of the subject. Anderson: You try to get one- third of a student ' s time and they yell Seaberg: It ' s been misinterpreted by too many people as an open door to WPI. That simply isn ' t the case. Grogan: It ' s consistent with the PLAN in its theoretical base but it wasn ' t part of the PLAN. Seaberg: There is no possibility that we could have negotiated admis- sions without the PLAN. If we think that it ' s totally unreal- istic for you to come to WPI, we are going to tell you that and we intend to be damn firm about it. Mazlish: If one had known ahead of time the problems to be en- countered, one would have wisely de- clined to begin the Plan at all. Yet faith seems to have overcome or dealt with almost all of the problems . . . the re- sult was not a house built on cards; as each part of the Plan became increas- ingly operational it provided a solu- tion rather than a dismissal of the problems we had encountered earlier . . . This is not to say that all of the difficulties with the Plan are over once and for all. Reed: . . . there are problems . . . one major problem and a series of minor (ones) . . . The major problem is cost. The Plan represents education inherently more expensive than the traditional format. I don ' t know how much more expensive — my estimate: 30% to 50% — nor do I know how WPI will pay for it. The excess cost stems directly from the Plan ' s need for substantially more faculty per student. The early success of the program has been made possible by a burst of faculty dedication and effort which cannot be sustained for the long haul. Van Alstyne: We have some ex- traordinary faculty. They are able and Wilbur Bridgman they ' re being killed ... by the amount of work they have to do. If you look at the PLAN ... we wrote it for 1500 undergraduates. And we have 50% more than that now . . . There ' s a limit to how much (the faculty) can do before they just collapse ... at the end of the year I see them absolutely exhausted. Wagner: . . . due to this system (the Plan) the time we have to put in is far, far, far greater than we ever had to before. We can ' t even be the stu- dents we used to be. We can ' t be the teachers we used to be ... I hear everybody complaining about it. That they . . . don ' t have time enough to prepare their lectures the way they used to . . . They ' re just running at full tilt all the time. Anderson: for thinking. ' There isn ' t any time Wagner: When we voted this Plan in . . . we were supposed to get three new professors. Which we didn ' t get. And plenty of shop help . . . right across the whole campus . . . plus . . . graduate student help so that we can give all this individual attention that we have never really gotten around to. In turn, the student body — a number of years ago — went roughly from 400 per class to 600 per class . . . And do you know how many profs we went up by? (ZERO) 11 The courses themselves are long, narrow corridors of knowledge ... in real life situations you constantly have to synthesize ideas . . . our program provided virtually no opportunity to do that — ev- erything was all in little boxes. — Bill Grogan Bill Grogan