I wrote an email to the assistant department head yesterday expressing my displeasure with a certain lab class of mine. When I say the lab class is bad, I mean it’s BAD. No exaggerations here.

They say that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Hopefully the administration will see fit to fix things.

Dear Dr. Tharp,

I’ve had some great experiences at this university. I’ve made some great personal connections among the faculty, and I feel that I’m well prepared for a career in engineering. After five years of hard work and an experience at another university overseas, I will be graduating this May. I love the University of Arizona, and I want to take every opportunity to improve it. That’s why I feel compelled to send you this letter, to express my frustrations with one of the core ECE courses.

The lab course ECE 301, titled “Electrical Engineering Laboratory,” is the worst course I have taken at this university. As I’m sure you know, this is a required course for all CE and EE undergraduates. Through a combination of lack of preparation on the part of the professor, the ridiculous grading methods, a few bouts of unprofessional behavior from the TSS staff, and poor curriculum structuring, this class has worn away at my patience. The only thing holding the lab together most of the time was a valiant attempt by my TA to make up for the lackluster performance of his superior.

Let me walk you through a typical week in this class. The lecture portion of the class was held on Monday, at which time Dr. Judkins, armed with a few sheets of paper and motivated by a plainly obvious desire to be anywhere else than that particular classroom, would enter the classroom and immediately start talking about the properties of some circuit vaguely relating to the lab, without introduction or background. Those of us lucky enough to have taken ECE 351a in a previous semester were sometimes able to follow his ramblings, though more often than not we were left in the lurch, frantically scribbling down notes.

My lab was on Wednesdays at 2pm, which meant that I had exactly two days between the lecture and the actual lab to do the prelab work. Because I had classes all day on Tuesday (which all had homework due on Tuesday), this equated to a frantic scramble in the three hours before lab on Wednesday reading through the terse, poorly written instructions, flipping through pages of Sedra and Smith, and trying to figure out what the hell it was we were supposed to do. But this wasn’t even the worst part.

Then came the trek upstairs, to the universe of arbitrary rules. Don’t arrive too early, because you won’t be allowed into the room. Don’t arrive too late, because you won’t be allowed into the lab. Don’t stand outside the door to wait for the room to open. Make sure you sign in, and show your catcard to the TA who knows you by name. Number every page in the bottom outside corner. Sign and date at the bottom of every page. Make sure you get a circuit check before you turn your circuit on. Make sure you get a circuit check after you know your circuit is working. Write down the name and serial number of every piece of equipment you use. Paste the PSpice schematic you did for prelab in your lab notebook, and then draw the exact same circuit diagram by hand. If you need a pinout diagram from the stockroom, you might get it, but you might be told to “just go look it up yourself.” Hurry up and get out before 4:45pm, lights out, safety be damned. A thousand bureaucratic regulations, a morass of drudgery, all getting in the way of us actually learning anything, all getting in the way of us JUST GETTING THE LAB DONE.

If we could figure out how to get around or ignore some of that garbage, we still faced the daunting task of getting our circuits to work. In many cases, including the last lab, it was painfully apparent that the person writing the instructions had never actually performed the experiment or built the circuit in question. Again, the TAs made every attempt to work around the issues that came up, but quite a few times we came into the lab with prelab material that just wouldn’t work.

Of course we were all told that “things don’t always work according to plan” and “there’s a lot of paperwork in the real world.” But to me, it came off as an excuse, and one that doesn’t fit an institution of higher learning.

At the moment, I’m writing a “technical report,” which to me is a vaguely defined paper based entirely upon how well one can format a document in Microsoft Word. On the last “technical report,” I was told to use active voice, and then docked points for it. I was also given a nebulous specification that contained a ridiculous amount of duplication and told the order of formatting was “optional”; when I cut down on fluff and rearranged things to make them more clear and concise, I was docked twenty points out of a hundred. I have never been shown how to write a “technical report,” or even shown an example of a good “technical report;” I just know that I need to write another one to pass this class. As there is no time for review or revision of my writing, I can only pray that I give the graders what they want.

I hope I’ve illustrated just how ludicrous this whole class seems to all of us, the students.

With this picture in mind, I’d like to offer a couple recommendations to improve things. I realize my opinion as an undergraduate probably isn’t that important, but maybe you’ll see some merit in my suggestions.

First of all, the administration needs to formulate a clear goal on what this two credit class is supposed to be. If it is supposed to be a companion course to ECE351a, as most students believe it should be, then integrate the lab exercises closely with the pace of that course, and get rid of the focus on presentation. If it is supposed to be a technical writing or bookkeeping course (and yes, those skills have their place), then don’t try to teach new material at the same time. Right now, the class tries to do both, and fails miserably. I would love to learn how to write technical papers– it should be a required course– and I would love to learn how to build amplifier circuits. Consider merging one credit with 351a as a mandatory lab, and devoting the other credit solely to technical writing.

Also (and I would do this myself, but fear for my grades), I would appreciate it if you could talk to Dr. Judkins about being a bit more prepared for future labs. While I understand a positive attitude might be a bit too much to expect from a doctor who probably doesn’t want to teach an undergrad lab course, it doesn’t help our morale as students when the professor doesn’t seem to care enough to try doing an experiment in the lab himself before throwing it out for credit. It also puts an incredible burden on the TAs, and I don’t think that’s fair to them.

Thank you for taking the time to read this letter. It turned into a bit more of a tirade than I originally expected, but I hope you take the length of this letter as a sign of how serious I am about improving this piece of the curriculum.

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