Healey01 said:
I agree to a point. I took some EE classes at Kettering University before changing over to physics. These included Circuits 1 and 2, Fields, and others.
My girlfriend is a EE graduated from Wayne State in Detroit. Its a good school, but when I helped her study for her fields class I was surprised at the speed at which they went and the material they covered. They covered in her 16 week course the same material (including depth) that I covered in my first 5 weeks at Kettering. And We only have 12 week courses. Basically in their fields class they started getting into induced currents/moving wires/magnetic fields in their last 2 weeks. I remember doing that maybe 4th week.
So there really IS a difference sometimes in the quality of the courses at whichever school you go to. The cheaper the schools get, usually the easier the course work. Maybe its not the cost, but more that the good institutions charge more. Fortunately for my girlfriend she's really bright and learned everything necessary and more so it didn't hinder her that much.
Bottom line is that I feel there is definitely a difference, if its only the depth and extent of material they decide to expose you to. As I learned personally, a statistics class at a community college is not the same as one at a private or ranked university.
I'd like to point out that the fact that WSU covers kettering's 5 weeks of material in ~12 weeks does not necessarily make the education at kettering any better. In fact, it may make it worse, in a way. Also, you have to consider different professors discuss things in different orders. Some profs like to introduce the math needed as it is applied, and other profs like to lay out the mathematical framework during the first 2 weeks or so of the course.
However, it is kinda surprising that they didn't start faraday's law and time varying fields until the second to last week.
At LTU, this is how my fields course was structured:
First 3 weeks was a comprehensive review of ALL of the essential vector algebra and vector calculus one should thoroughly be comfortable with to get anything out of a fields course.
During weeks 4-5 we covered electrostatics in free space quite thoroughly, and during week 6 we covered electrostatics in material media.
During weeks 7-8 we covered magnetostatics in free space and during week 9 we covered magnetostatics in material media.
During week 10-12 we covered time varying fields, and the corrected maxwell's equations in integral and differential form.
The last 2 weeks was spent on electromagnetic waves and waveguides/transmission like theory.
IMO, the pace of the course was perfect and the depth of the treatment was quite good.
and BTW, Kettering's curriculum is a lot different than most universities. IIRC, there's really only 1/2 the time to cover a full engineering curriculum worth of subject matter since the other time is spent doing mandatory industry internships. Whether this is a good approach really depends on your viewpoint.
