Arizona State University Reviews of Bachelor's in Engineering

The Materials Engineering program at Arizona State is very rigorous. but is also a rewarding program. The program does a good job of focusing on mechanical and electrical properties of materials at are beneficial for not only the overall knowledge of the student but also for their employment opportunities. This directly benefits many companies in the local phoenix area, such as Intel, NXP, ON Semiconductor, as well as many other companies from a multitude of industries that need Materials Engineers... Read More to produce superior products for the market place. The instruction could be improved, there is way to much emphasis in many classes is on test taking rather than actual application, which I feel application in the form of small projects is more applicable if one is going into industry. Also one thing about the over all curriculum that could be improved is in the middle of the junior year allow students pathway courses for specific material they are interested in. For instance if a student interested in polymers, ceramics, metals, bio-materials or semiconductors have courses that specific to those classes of materials. All that aside the program as whole is very good in comparison with other schools and the graduate program is one of the best in the country, I would recommend the program to anyone interested in pursuing Materials Engineering.

There are really two separate schools here --the campus school and the online school. I attended the online school. What I found was that the stated work load for the courses did not match the credit hour ratings. For instance, the 2 credit Intro to Engineering Science course had some interesting content, but it required 12 hours weekly to manage it, with some weeks reaching to 30 hours. The typical work load for a 2 credit course is supposed to be roughly 3 hours for every credit, or 6 hours. The... Read More course itself had material that was quite interesting --creating a musical instrument. But a large portion of the final grade is based on the work group playing a song together in the proper key and notes from instruments created. Many of the students were panicked about creating instruments, and there were points removed from creativity for not coming up with an idea solely yourself. And the constraints on the instrument materials made the project quite tricky for novices, leading to a lot of extra time working on a design. This was not the only anomaly. The C++ course that was 3 credits was about a 6-8 hour workload per week, had difficult to understand videos for course instruction, and a new programmer would have a lot of difficulty managing the programs without a lot of consultation. Discussion forums only go so far. Calculus is what finally drove me out. Most college calculus courses are 15 weeks long. All of ASU's courses are 7.5 weeks long. And that's compressing an already difficult subject into a very tight timeline with requirements to make high grades to continue in the Engineering program. There are no 15 week online courses. Calculus and Physics are run with the Pearson tools, and many students complain that they are never sure if their wrong answers are due to not entering the answer in the way that the tool requires or whether they just got the problems wrong. But I seriously question the mastery of a subject in a 7.5 week compressed course. It is VERY difficult to manage this hurdle. As noted by others, instructors and TAs don't always answer email promptly. If you are overseas, finding tutoring that will fit your hours is going to be quite difficult. The hours run are Arizona standard time. I also found that the course graders for some subjects were not actually grading the homework. There was no feedback after the work was graded. And I found that on some occasions, work that I turned in incomplete got perfect scores while other work was meticulously graded but not feedback given for points taken off. I wondered if it is possibly a degree mill or a cash cow for an established school. Those students in the US thinking of taking this should instead look at community colleges for basic credits in math and physics at cheaper prices with longer terms. These courses are crucial to STEM degrees and should not be rushed through without thoroughly understanding the material.