Academic Disconnect

I few years back, I had an intern, a really sharp one. He came in one day with a homework problem he was stumped on. I took a look at it for a few minutes, and then said…… Hmmm, I wonder if the prof want’s the right answer, or an academic one.

The difference being, the correct answer would be what would happen if a guy were to actually try to implement the idea. The academic one requiring a ton of assumptions, with two of them being that everything was perfect, and their were zero external factors at play. In addition, a real answer might take a few hours, or perhaps days to solve, and it would probably be a good estimate, an academic one, perhaps 15 minutes, but would be a nice canned solution. Now, not knowing the prof, it was hard to tell, so I told my intern to go back and ask what the prof wanted… It turns out he wanted the academic answer.

Its the same with journals. Things are so over simplified such that a few neat differential equations make for a cool looking paper. However, if you try to take the research further in a commercial endeavor, its almost like starting over, due to huge assumptions, combined with total disregard for real world effects in order to make something look pretty.

I wonder if students are being short changed with this methodology. Sure, they accomplish a lot of homework this way, and become well versed in math, but I’m not so sure of how valid it is.

Yet, by the same thought process, students may need a basic understanding to build upon…. but an errant one, just seems wrong to me.

I see this changing with some engineering schools where they focus on problem solving almost from the get go. While I like the idea in concept, I’m also thinking some critical thinking skills may get overlooked in the process. Otoh, the results do seem favorable, but only time will tell.

Its a tough situation for those in academia though. The intent of engineering school is not technical skill, but more so, education process, such that an engineer can learn fast and develop the needed skills to accomplish a task in short order, rather than those skills in and of themselves.