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My Brother, first year Engineering
Mid term test.
My Brother said he got a 5
I asked, 5 out of 10
No, 5 out of 100
Top Mark > 72 out of 100
Class Average > 3.5 out of 100

My Brother thought he did okay

Honestly, that is ridiculous. If the class average is really 3.5 either the exam is way too hard or almost no one is studying. Either way, something is broken.

Was your brother’s exam written by the professor?
Or was it generated automatically by the textbook company?

One big complaint today is that tests are generated by the textbook companies.

In the old days, the professor’s lectures prepared us for our exams.

Now, many tests are automatically generated, and not even the professors know what the test will cover.
Students could be asked about anything in the textbook.

But, if the prof wrote the exam, then he/she must not have prepared those students well.

I graduated in 4 years in 1976, with 141 semester hours and a 2.94, thanks to changing my major to Public Accounting my sophomore year. I had the same accounting professor my last 3 years, he was the ONLY accounting professor from sophomore year.

He never used numbers, taught the theory behind each situation. His tests were legendary: mid-term and final, 5 essay questions. For two, and sometimes three questions, the first sentence of your answer had to start with, “based on the information you’ve given me, I cannot answer this question.” Then you had to explain why.

By senior year, you couldn’t help but love and appreciate him. He had a wicked sense of humor. As his only student in ROTC, I was the target of more than a few jabs, all in jest.

5 out of 100 is really low, even for a first engineering class. These introductory classes are usually sophomore level and purposely very hard to weed out aspiring engineers early.

My sophomore chemical engineering class was doing brain twister mass balance solutions. Algebra only. Prerequisites were freshman algebra and freshman chemistry I & II. About 60 started the class IIRC, about 20 passed it C or better. Easily half of the students dropped the class after the first test. No mercy.

Mechanical and electrical have their own introductory classes as well. Lots of folks don't make it through but I don't recall the typical weed out rate. I had to take two ME and one EE classes that were in this intro category. Not familiar at all with civil engineering or “environmental” engineering. Meteorology is also in the engineering college and is probably harder than ChE.

The rigor of that ChE class came in handy 15 years later when doing a mass balance for an entire oil refinery using the monthly production reports. It took 9 months. 2/3 of this was the math (computer assisted), 1/3 writing a public domain report to submit to regulators, a management report for internal use and a training plan for operations.