[mikepurvis]

I graduated from UW engineering in 2010, and I'm certainly sympathetic to this perspective. The most practical and worthwhile experience comes from good co-op placements, doing student team work, and working on an interesting fourth-year design project.

There were definitely some courses which rewarded memorization—especially the EE courses, as I recall. My exam for an analog filters course was almost entirely graded on my ability to produce schematics for various op-amp filter configurations. Similarly for a power electronics course, which was largely about memorizing equivalent circuits for non-ideal transformers and DC motors, and computing the values of the various resistors and capacitors which account for losses in those types of systems.

And his remark about labs is on the mark, too. Pretty much every time I deviated from the precise step-by-step instructions to "explore the material", I was docked points. The TAs marking my lab report just weren't interested in what I was learning or discovering—they had a checklist of specific plots and statements they were expecting to find in the report, and that's what the grade came from.