I recently had a chat with a friend whose daughter is studying in Bilkent Computer Engineering. She is a highly capable student, ranking in the top 0.01% of the Turkish university entrance exam (YKS) but received shockingly low grades in her Calculus courses, despite studying hard. It was not just her, the class average was 30/100. Note that this is not a one-time occurrence, it has been going on for years in Bilkent. She had a similar experience with Physics and even English and Turkish courses.
It is especially depressing when you consider that mastery of Calculus, Physics, English or Turkish is not the primary goal of a Computer Engineering degree. The university is a place to enjoy learning, work on projects and make social connections, not to grind and be miserable.
From the students' perspective, the system feels unnecessarily punitive, if not outright hostile. But there are rational reasons:
- Professors are assessed by how many papers they write, not by how well they teach. Students are a nuisance for them, taking time from their paper writing.
- Professors never learned to teach in the first place, teaching is often something professors are expected to learn on the job.
- In fields such as computer engineering, industry can offer substantially higher salaries, making it harder for universities to retain faculty, decreasing the overall quality.
- Some universities treat first- and second-year courses as weed-out classes. The instructor likely views themselves as an unyielding gatekeeper whose job is to "filter out" students rather than educate them.
Because of these factors, a good teacher is the exception, not the norm.
The German Fachhochschule (University of Applied Sciences) system provides a different model. Faculty are hired with a much stronger emphasis on practical and professional expertise, and the institutional mission places greater weight on applied teaching. Faculty bandwidth is spent on curriculum development, lab coordination, and student mentorship rather than grant writing and journal production. Calculus, linear algebra, and discrete math are taught through the lens of engineering execution. Theory is paired directly with laboratory work, project-based design, and practical software implementation. The goal is building functional engineering intuition rather than testing formal, hyper-abstract edge cases under high-pressure exam conditions.
When the institutional incentives are misaligned, students can end up being rigorously tested on things that don't meaningfully improve their ability to engineer. It boils down to theory in service of engineering vs. theory as an academic filtering mechanism. The Fachhochschule model is an example of an institution designed around an objective more closely aligned with what an engineering degree is supposed to achieve.
