Reengineering the Curriculum: Design
`and Analysis of a New Undergraduate
`Electrical and Computer Engineering Degree
`at Carnegie Mellon University
`
`STEPHEN W. DIRECTOR, FELLOW, IEEE, PRADEEP K. KHOSLA, FELLOW, IEEE,
`RONALD A. R O H R E R , FELLOW, IEEE, AND ROB A. RUTENBAR, SENIOR MEMBER, IEEE
`
`Invited Paper
`
`In the Fall of 1991, after approximately two years of devel-
`opment, the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
`(ECE) at Camegie Mellon University (CMU) implemented a new
`curriculum that differed radically from its predecessor. Key fea-
`tures of this curriculum include: Engineering in the Freshman
`year, a small core of required classes, area requirements in place
`of most speciJc course requirements, mandated breadth, depth,
`design, and coverage across ECE technical areas, a relatively
`large fraction of free electives, and a single integrated Bachelor
`of Science degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. In
`this paper we review the design of this curriculum, including a
`taxonomy of problems we needed to address, and a set of general
`principles we evolved to address them. The new curriculum is
`described in detail, including new data from an ongoing analysis
`of its impact on students’ curricula choices.
`
`I. INTRODUCTION
`Current engineering practice has, by necessity, evolved
`to keep pace with technology: witness the rate at which
`fundamentally new ideas are introduced into new products.
`One might suppose, then, that current engineering education
`has also evolved to track such new developments. However,
`we argue that engineering education has really evolved only
`to the extent that individual engineering courses have been
`updated-usually with increased density of content-to
`reflect new developments. The prevailing philosophy of
`engineering education-teach
`first the basics in mathe-
`matics and science, follow with exposition of engineering
`applications-has
`remained unchanged and unchallenged
`for more than four decades. While contributing to the cre-
`ation of engineers who are current in specific technologies,
`
`Manuscript received December 7, 1994; revised April 12, 1995.
`The authors are with the College of Engineering, Carnegie Mellon
`University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA.
`IEEE Log Number 9413199.
`
`we believe that teaching of unmotivated math and science
`followed by incrementally updated technical courses is
`fundamentally flawed. It contributes little to the education
`of engineers who can acquire new knowledge as necessary,
`cope with dynamically changing work environments, or
`excel in nontraditional jobs. We believe that real impact
`in engineering education will be made only by looking
`at the curriculum as a whole, in the context of present
`technological and societal needs, and not just by constant
`repolishing of aging courses. It is not our intention to
`imply that engineering education has completely failed in
`its goals. Rather, we wish to drive home the point that there
`are advantages to be found in taking a fresh, unfettered look
`at the undergraduate curriculum.
`Of course, curricula have tremendous inertia, and often
`resist all but the most incremental and cosmetic of changes.
`Unfortunately, many of the problems faced by engineering
`educators are not amenable to simple, incremental fixes.
`In October 1989, the college of engineering at Carnegie
`Mellon University (CMU) instituted a review process across
`all engineering departments. The goal was to evaluate how
`well the educational mission of the college was being
`conducted, with an eye toward redefining both collegewide
`and department-specific curriculum requirements. Because
`of the breadth of this undertaking, each engineering depart-
`ment was allowed to consider the best possible curriculum
`changes, not merely those that could be wedged conve-
`niently into its current web of requirements, prerequisites,
`constraints, and customs. This paper describes the design
`and implementation of the new Electrical and Computer
`Engineering Bachelor’s degree program that emerged from
`this process. This curriculum, which took approximately
`two years to design fully, was implemented within the de-
`
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`partment of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) in
`the Fall of 1991, and produced its first four-year graduates
`in the Spring of 1995.
`Within ECE, the curriculum was designed by a committee
`whose quickly adopted name reflected the spirit of process:
`the Wipe-the-Slate-Clean Committee. Composed of eleven
`faculty from across the breadth of the department’s research
`and teaching areas, the committee interviewed both students
`and faculty, and worked aggressively for roughly one year
`to dissect, analyze, disassemble, and finally redefine the
`ECE undergraduate curriculum. The new curriculum that
`resulted from this process hinges on a few key ideas:
`Engineering courses begin in the Freshman year, con-
`current with mathematics and science.
`The core of required “essential” engineering classes is
`extremely small.
`Area requirements across a spectrum of electrical and
`computer engineering topical areas replace most spe-
`cific course requirements.
`Breadth, depth, and coverage are mandated across this
`spectrum of technical areas, but individual courses are
`not prescribed; students flexibly choose from among
`available topical areas.
`Nearly a full year of the curriculum is unconstrained.
`At completion, the curriculum offers a single, unified
`Bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engi-
`neering.
`The end result of our exercise is a curriculum which has
`been recently reviewed by ABET for accreditation under
`the ABET “innovative cumculum” clause that permits
`thoughtful experimental curricula that diverge from existing
`ABET standards to be considered on their merits. While
`the final outcome of the accreditation process will not be
`known until late 1995, comments made by the visiting team
`were favorable. Also, initial analysis of the three groups of
`freshman entering ECE in 1991, 1992, and 1993 (about
`150 students in each group) indicates that the students
`are enthusiastic about starting engineering classes in the
`Freshman year and that these are helpful to the student
`when selecting their major. There is also evidence to
`show that the flexibility in the choice of electives has not
`resulted in a mass exodus to “easier” courses. In general
`students continue to elect challenging courses to suit their
`interests.
`In this paper we share some of the details of the design
`process for this new curriculum, and an analysis (ongoing)
`of its implementation and impact.’ Of course, we were
`not alone among universities as we embarked on our
`reengineering efforts; for example, Drexel, Rose-Hulman,
`and Texas A&M were already restructuring their curricula
`as we began our efforts, and as well the US National
`Science Foundation was organizing Engineering Education
`Coalitions with similar intent. Nevertheless, we did not
`join any of these efforts for fear of diluting our own
`efforts. So rather than attempt a broad survey of competing
`
`‘See [l] for a more detailed, contemporaneous account of this process,
`and [2] for a more recent review.
`
`curriculum strategies, we focus entirely and closely on our
`own redesign effort, from beginning to end. We offer this
`as one case study for how one department reengineered its
`curriculum.
`The remainder of the paper is organized as follows.
`Section I1 begins by summarizing our motivations for
`undertaking this effort. Section I11 offers a taxonomy of
`the basic problems faced by any electrical or computer
`engineering department as it struggles to keep pace with
`technology, students, and society. Section IV describes
`the design principles for the new Carnegie Mellon ECE
`curriculum that we evolved in response to these problems.
`Section V describes the details of the new curriculum, and
`some of its novel characteristics. Section VI describes its
`implementation, and recent efforts to analyze its impact
`on students. Finally, Section VI1 offers some concluding
`remarks.
`
`11. MOTIVATIONS
`
`A. Why Change?
`By any traditional measure in 1991, the ECE department
`was doing well educating its students. The department as
`a whole was consistently ranked among the country’s top
`EE departments [3] (Components of the graduate program
`were likewise being ranked highly [4]). The department
`attracted outstanding undergraduate students: ECE was the
`first choice among engineering departments of most en-
`tering Freshman. Our graduates were recruited heavily by
`US companies, and the ECE department was on the list of
`must-visit departments for many companies that recruited
`only among a select set of elite schools. Our graduates
`who chose to pursue an advanced degree went on to elite
`graduate schools.
`So, why did we undertake a substantial reorganization
`of our curriculum? The answers are not simple, nor are
`they independent. We categorize our broad concerns in the
`following subsections, beginning with a quick overview of
`the original ECE curriculum as it stood in the 1990-1991
`academic year. These concerns can be regarded as the
`beginnings of a set of “specifications” for a new curriculum.
`
`B. Original CMU ECE Curriculum
`In 1991, the ECE department offered two four-year
`ABET-accredited Bachelor of Science degrees: the Bache-
`lor of Science in Electrical Engineering (BSEE) and the
`Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering (BSCE).
`Both curricula shared a common Freshman year empha-
`sizing mathematics, science, and computer programming.
`They also shared a common core of engineering classes,
`emphasizing linear circuits, electronics, solid state devices,
`digital logic design, and microprocessors. In addition, these
`curricula (as did all curricula in the colleges of engineering
`and science) shared common requirements for humanities
`and social science courses (called H&SS) that amounted to
`roughly one such course per semester. An overview of the
`curricula appears in Table 1.
`
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`Table 1 Original Carnegie Mellon EE and CE Cumcula
`Electrical Engineering
`Mathematics & Sciences
`Calculus
`Differential Equations
`Linear Algebra
`Probability
`Physics
`Chemistry
`Computer Programming
`
`Electrical & Computer Engineering
`Intro Digital Systems
`Linear Circuits
`Intro Electronic Devices
`Electromagnetics
`Signals & Systems
`Analog Circuits
`Digital Integrated Circuits
`EE Elective
`Senior Design Elective
`
`Electives
`Freshman
`Engineering Science
`Technical
`Free
`Humanities & Social Sciences
`
`Courses
`
`1
`
`1
`1
`
`2
`2
`5
`1
`8
`
`I Computer Engineering
`I Mathematics & Sciences
`Calculus
`Differential Equations
`Linear Algebra
`Probability
`Modem Math
`Physics
`Chemistry
`Computer Programming
`Electrical & Computer Engineering
`Intro Digital Systems
`Linear Circuits
`Into Electronic Devices
`Computer Architecture
`Concurrency & Real Time Systems
`Digital Integrated Circuits
`Logic & Processor Design
`Computer Science
`Fundamentals of CS
`CS Elective
`Electives
`Freshman
`Engineering Science
`Technical
`Free
`Humanities & Social Sciences
`
`Courses
`
`1
`1
`
`1
`1
`1
`1
`1
`1
`2
`
`2
`1
`
`2
`2
`5
`1
`8
`
`After this common core, the two curricula diverged. The
`BSEE emphasized traditional electrical engineering topics
`such as electromagnetics, analog circuits, and signals and
`systems. The BSCE emphasized computer hardware and
`software topics such as computer architecture, processor
`design, data structures, and concurrency. Both curricula
`required several technical electives, and a capstone design
`elective.
`In 1991, about 40% of our students pursued the BSEE,
`and about 50% pursued the BSCE. Roughly 10% of our
`students chose to double major in both electrical engi-
`neering (EE) and computer engineering (CE). This was
`accomplished at the sacrifice of most elective classes:
`Students completed the core requirements of one curriculum
`using the elective slots provided in the other. Also, a few
`of our students double-majored in computer engineering
`and computer science (which is in a separate college at
`Carnegie Mellon). This essentially required that all elective
`classes in the BSCE curriculum were chosen to complete
`computer science core requirements.
`
`C. Remove Structural Impediments to
`Accommodate Incremental Change
`Curricula usually evolve by accretion, with new require-
`ments and constraints often layered incompatibly on top
`of existing structures. The resulting rigid course sequences
`connected by spaghetti-like chains of prerequisites are
`difficult to modify. This was certainly true of our orig-
`inal EE and CE curricula, and by extension, likely true
`in many similar Electrical Engineering departments that
`evolved over the last two decades to become departments
`of Electrical and Computer Engineering, or departments
`
`of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. In our
`own case, the end result was that even incremental changes
`became difficult to implement.
`In the original parallel BSEE and BSCE curricula, even
`modest changes rippled in undesirable ways throughout
`the two programs. An example makes this concrete. As
`a result of an ABET accreditation visit, we were asked to
`add a linear algebra class as a graduation requirement. We
`responded enthusiastically, on the assumption that we could
`migrate the course into the early years of the curriculum,
`and thus make it a prerequisite for our linear circuits class.
`In this position, it would strengthen the background of all
`EE students in our circuits and electronics courses, and
`broaden the background of our CE students by exposing
`them to more noncalculus mathematics.
`Unfortunately, this ideal proved impossible to implement.
`There was no small-scale alteration of the BSEE and BSCE
`course sequences that could permit the linear algebra class
`to be taken by all students before the courses that would use
`it as a prerequisite. This problem derived from the slight
`differences in the first few years of the BSEE and BSCE
`requirements. The BSCE student began to take computer
`science classes fairly early, so that Junior and Senior
`computer engineering courses were correctly synchronized
`with their computer science prerequisites. In contrast, the
`BSEE student had no such requirements. The end result was
`that we required our students to take a linear algebra class,
`but we did essentially nothing to exploit this background in
`other ECE core classes. This simple example makes clear
`how difficult it can become to achieve the goal of uniform
`mathematics, science, and engineering core preparation for
`both BSEE and BSCE students.
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`D. Rationalize Requirements for Topical
`Coverage and Workload
`As has become amply clear over the last decade, the
`disciplines of electrical and computer engineering are ex-
`panding rapidly as new technical discoveries are made and
`applied. Likewise, society is placing increasing demands
`on our graduates to apply their skills in new contexts, and
`to appreciate and manage intelligently the consequences
`of their technical decisions. Consequently, the number of
`“critical” topics to which ECE students could profitably
`be exposed is also expanding. What is not cxpanding is the
`time we have to educate someone to level of the Bachelor’s
`degree.2 Coming to grips with this accelerating problem was
`at the heart of our motivation for a significant restructuring
`of our curriculum.
`The original ECE curriculum required a large number
`of core classes, designed to ensure familiarity with a
`substantial subset of traditional EE and CE topics. After a
`great deal of argument and discussion, we came to believe
`that this approach, which implicitly assumes all students
`need exposure to (almost) all areas, was no longer credible
`as the core of a curriculum for the 21st century. Such a
`strategy mandates that we compress ever more material
`into the same number of classes. Many of our courses
`had already fallen victim to “units-creep,’’ i.e., challenging
`classes meant to require 12 hours of work per week had
`inflated to require 15 or 18 hours of work from even the
`best of students. This was caused by well meaning faculty
`working hard to give students the best, most thorough
`view of as many topical areas they could-usually with
`the assumption that this was the only opportunity students
`would ever have to see the material.
`While certainly not opposed to demanding classes, we
`concluded that the overall strategy of putting more material
`into the curriculum had become decreasingly effective.
`Students were being asked to absorb increasing amounts
`of material, which left less time for reflection, for alter-
`native perspectives on similar technical problems, and for
`revisiting background material to ensure comprehension.
`The unpredictable preparation of entering students only
`exacerbated this problem: we kept discovering that many
`of our students had never seen material fundamental to the
`background of our core courses. The end result was that by
`forcing students to juggle too many topics with too little
`time to master these topics, many students were learning
`even less material, less well.
`
`E. Emphasize Engineering Ideas Over Techniques
`A related consequence of the explosion of material was
`that many students came to view their courses as a set
`of unrelated hurdles to be overcome. As a result, many
`students were acquiring only a bag of seemingly unre-
`
`*An altemative is, of course, to extend the amount of time required to
`educate students to some minimum level of professional competence. Such
`an approach was advanced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
`in [SI which proposed a five-year accredited Master’s program as the
`principal mechanism for educating entry-level engineers. We retum to this
`idea in Section VI.
`
`lated problems and solution techniques, without ever really
`understanding the big ideas that bind and inform these
`techniques.
`Conventional wisdom suggested that after first teaching a
`vast body of fundamental mathematics and science-which
`students absorbed like sponges-we were free to teach
`engineering principles, drawing as necessary on the deep
`well of basic knowledge internalized by the student in
`these early studies. This was (and is) a lovely idea, but
`depressingly unrealistic. Students often had weak or wildly
`varying preparation in K-12 mathematics and science, and
`hence uncertain motivation to master the rigorous college
`level versions of these fundamentals. When a flood of
`engineering ideas was introduced on top of this precarious
`foundation, the outcome was often less than satisfactory.
`Too often, students only had time to focus on the me-
`chanical problem-formula-solution aspects of the topics,
`without developing a deeper sense of the fundamentals, the
`interconnections, and the real ideas.
`This is especially unfortunate in a fast-moving discipline,
`where the half-life of a Bachelor’s degree is probably less
`than a decade, and a solid understanding of the “big picture”
`is the most successful base from which to acquire new
`skills. As educators, we do our students a disservice if we
`fail to impart a coherent, connected view of the ideas that
`define our discipline.
`
`F. Support Interdisciplinary Studies
`The most creative and far-reaching contributions are
`often made by individuals at the boundaries of sev-
`eral disciplines. Likewise, society is placing increasing
`value on engineers who can apply their skills across
`disciplines, and can evaluate intelligently the broader
`consequences of their actions. ECE is an extremely wide
`field, and many of its most exciting frontiers-very
`large
`scale integrated circuits (VLSI), microelectromechanical
`systems (MEMS), electronic materials, computer-aided
`manufacturing, telecommunications networks, supercom-
`puting-have
`strong and established interdisciplinary
`linkages. However, our original curriculum did little
`to encourage the creation of engineers who could
`work comfortably across the boundaries of several
`disciplines.
`The original curriculum implicitly assumed that there
`were only two sorts of engineers: EE’s and CE’s. These
`were produced by completion of a large, rigid core of EE or
`CE engineering classes. Although industry specifically, and
`society generally might have valued highly a student who
`had completed, say, 60% of the EE core classes and 40% of
`the CE core classes, we had no mechanism for giving this
`broad individual a degree. Nor did we have any mechanism
`for coping with an even broader individual who might have
`wished to complete, say, 30% of the EE core, 30% of the
`CE core, then a dozen classes in mechanical engineering,
`operations research and Japanese language, in preparation
`for a career in computer-aided manufacturing. Indeed, a
`key conclusion of the early discussion of the Wipe-the-
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`Slate-Clean committee was that we would like not only to
`tolerate such individuals, but to encourage them.
`
`111. CURRICULUM DESIGN: PROBLEMS
`A central tenet of any engineering education is that
`no elegant solution is likely to be found for a problem
`that lacks a crisp definition. Unfortunately, curricula are
`complex, often unwieldy creations subject to conflicting
`demands from the university, from faculty, from students
`and their parents, and from the industries that employ grad-
`uates. Nevertheless, over the course of its deliberations, our
`committee kept returning to several specific problems which
`crystallized as the basic issues to address. We summarize
`these here.
`
`0
`
`0
`
`A. Student Preparation is Incomplete
`American K-12 education can be blamed for the incom-
`plete mathematics and science preparation of many of our
`students. Nevertheless, allocating blame does nothing to
`improve the preparation of our students after they arrive.
`Moreover, entering students are simply different than they
`were in past decades: less homogeneous, more diverse in
`their personal goals and career aspirations. Any curriculum
`redesign must deal with the following facts:
`Students have less facility and depth in the techni-
`cal areas we expect all students to have seen, for
`example, algebra and geometry. Some unremarkable
`mathematical manipulations that appear frequently in
`introductory science and engineering classes severely
`tax many students.
`seemingly
`Students-even the best students-have
`random gaps in their backgrounds. In the course of
`our meetings, the Wipe-the-Slate-Clean Committee
`talked to a superb Senior EE student, a straight-A
`student who was being aggressively pursued by elite
`graduate schools. Yet she mentioned to us that she was
`very uncomfortable in her first circuits class, having
`never seen a complex variable before.
`Most students have almost no basic laboratory skills
`when they enter the department, for example: how to
`keep a lab notebook; how to observe an experiment;
`how to deal with significant digits and experimental
`error; how to use orders of magnitude and quick-and-
`dirty calculations to estimate whether a measured result
`is in the right ballpark or has gone badly awry, etc.
`A related point: students have virtually no hardware
`tinkering skills. Previous generations of EE’s were
`notorious tinkerers, with radios and motors and the
`like. Upon entering college, they knew what a wire
`was, and a battery. They knew how to solder and read
`the resistor color code. This is no longer true, and
`the most elementary of hardware skills-what
`a wire
`is, what it does, how it can and cannot connect to a
`battery-must now be taught explicitly. (This is not ex-
`actly surprising, given the inaccessibility of the insides
`of most electronic products these days.) Our students
`are now much more likely to have software tinkering
`
`0
`
`0
`
`0
`
`experience. However, many students, especially those
`from less well off high schools, arrive without any
`exposure to programming ideas or hardware concepts.
`Student expectations and faculty expectations often
`differ. Roughly speaking, we tend to assume students
`have the background, energy and motivation to go
`acquire whatever mathematics, science, lab skills, etc.,
`that they lack, if we send them off in the right direction.
`(This has always been true of the best students.) In
`contrast, many students tend to assume that we will
`teach them every topic-the
`big ideas as well as the
`basic mechanical skills, the central topics as well as the
`peripheral background material-without
`independent
`initiative on their part.
`Any solution here must reconsider how and where in the
`cumculum to teach these fundamentals, and to what level
`of detail.
`
`B. Student Perspective on EE, CE, and
`Subdisciplines is Lacking
`By the time they are Seniors, faculty usually expect
`students to make intelligent choices when they have the op-
`portunity to choose an engineering elective course. Students
`are expected to ask their faculty advisers for guidance here,
`and to listen to whatever advice is offered. Our experience
`as educators suggests that it is already questionable whether
`this works for Seniors, who have a fairly extensive technical
`background. However, it is clear that students taking their
`very first course in a core ECE area like solid state
`devices or computer architecture are usually not clear
`about how this area connects to the rest of ECE as a
`whole.
`This was a particular problem in our original 1991
`curriculum. At this time, ECE offered two parallel cumcula:
`the BSEE and BSCE tracks, one of which students had to
`choose sometime during the Sophomore year. The problem
`was how to educate students to make an informed choice.
`Certainly, some students arrived absolutely decided on one
`track or the other. But many relied on our introductory
`courses to paint a sufficiently broad picture of the discipline
`for them to make a choice. Unfortunately, these introduc-
`tory courses concentrated almost entirely on packing in
`as much engineering material as possible. As faculty, we
`were often surprised when, after a few weeks in class, in
`the middle of some intricate technical discussion, a brave
`Sophomore would ask something like this:
`Exactly what does a computer engineer do? And how
`does this material help me to be a computer engineer?
`Is this different from computer science? Is the difference
`that we do hardware and they do software? When I
`graduate will I only be able to design big computers,
`or do computer engineers do something else as well?
`And why am I taking all these circuits classes-isn’t
`that for the electrical engineers?
`The emphasis on maximizing technical content in those few
`hours per week left little time to address all these questions
`satisfactorily. And as the breadth of the discipline continues
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`to expand, we must confront this problem directly if our
`students are to make informed curriculum choices.
`
`C. Appreciation of Underlying Ideas is Weak
`We are not alone in observing that students often acquire
`only the mechanical aspects of the topics that we teach,
`without understanding the underlying ideas. The problem is
`pervasive in the teaching of technical material. For example,
`a National Science Foundation article on the teaching of
`college calculus relates this story [6]:
`A mechanical engineering professor mentioned in pass-
`ing to a class of sophomores that an integral is a sum. He
`simply assumed that the students had learned this basic
`idea from first-year calculus. But the students stared
`uncomprehendingly back at the professor. “Students
`seem to have a facility for doing things,” [the professor]
`concludes, “but they lack a sense of ideas.”
`Similar stories were easy to come by in our own de-
`partment. For example, in [7], one of our own faculty
`observed:
`[In several ECE courses] I’ve worked hard to help
`students achieve a rich and insightful understanding of
`fundamental material. Most of them seem to think I do
`a good job; they say on their FCE’s [Faculty Course
`Evaluations, a survey of each student’s evaluation of and
`reactions to the course, conducted by Carnegie Mellon
`itself] that I make even difficult and abstract concepts
`seem clear.
`Yet, when I look at the reality of their understand-
`ing, as gauged through exams and discussions in and
`out of class, it’s grossly disappointing. The majority
`simply don’t get it. Their survival skills allow many
`to get through with C’s and D’s, based mostly upon
`regurgitation of techniques I’ve shown them repetitively,
`as both they and I have forced ourselves through a
`distasteful process of pounding in material which they
`find mysterious and useless and which I find beautiful
`and important.
`Students’ varying technical preparation, the increasing
`diversity of their backgrounds, the divergence of student
`and faculty expectations and the widespread practice of
`packing ever more material into the same number of
`classes all compound the problem. We argue that curriculum
`designers must now address this problem directly. The mere
`mechanical skills that a student acquires in “survival” mode
`have a disturbingly short half-life in our rapidly moving
`discipline. The question is how to motivate students to
`appreciate the connectedness among abstract ideas, concrete
`applications, their classes, and their careers.
`
`D. Breadth in All Relevant Topical Areas is Impossible
`A foundation of many ‘‘classical’’ engineering curricula
`is the notion that every engineer must know something
`about every area of the discipline. There was certainly
`an era in which this was a reasonable assumption for
`electrical engineers. We argue that this is no longer a vi-
`able assumption-especially for an ECE department whose
`
`faculty engage in a broad program of research ranging
`from basic physics to advanced computer science. Dis-
`tancing a curriculum from this notion is difficult, since
`it tramples on nearly every faculty member’s most cher-
`ished subjects. Any attempt to reach consensus on a min-
`imum set of advanced topics to mandate in a curricu-
`lum rapidly yields a huge and unwieldy set of essential
`classes.
`One approach that we had already tried in 1991 was
`to partition the undergraduates into separate degree tracks
`leading to different BS degrees. As Carnegie Mellon’s EE
`department evolved into an ECE department, its degree
`offerings evolved into parallel BSEE and BSCE tracks.
`Computer engineering faculty argued that many required
`electrical engineering classes were inessential to the edu-
`cation of a computer engineer, and should be replaced by
`more relevant course requirements. Electrical engineering
`faculty countered that if students did not take the full
`complement of required electrical engineering classes, they
`should not be graduated as “electrical engineers.” So, a
`separate computer engineering degree was an agreeable
`solution.
`In hindsight, this debate nicely crystallizes a key problem
`for curricula as they try to evolve: what is essential to earn a
`degree with the words “electrical engineer” (or, in our case
`“computer engineer”) in the title? Slicing off portions of the
`curriculum to award them separate degrees whenever they
`attain some sort of “critical mass” is not a viable long-term
`strategy: New technologies and ideas become candidates for
`core topics in the curriculum faster than old topics expire.
`Any serious attempt at curriculum redesign must address
`the necessarily contentious issue of which topics are truly
`essential.
`
`E, Interdisciplinary Studies are DifJicult
`Many engineering curricula are based on a large number
`of required engineering classes and restricted technical
`electives. This was certainly true of our original ECE
`curriculum. The problem was how to deal with a student
`who wished to trade some technical depth for breadth.
`In 1991, one of our BSEE students could take some
`computer engineering courses, just as a BSCE student could
`take some electrical engineering courses. But we had no
`mechanism to give a degree to someone who chose to be
`broad, who chose to take, for example, 50% of