Widespread chaos and confusion beset the School of Engineering and Applied Science community yesterday after administrators announced that the school would be shut down for the next academic year.
The school will be forced to close due to its failure to be re-accredited.
The Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology -- a leading national engineering-school accreditor -- labeled every SEAS department and program "deficient."
Administrators had been grappling with re-accreditation issues since the early winter, but none had expected such dire consequences.
Engineering Dean Eduardo Glandt said he was utterly shocked by the accreditor's decision.
"I don't know how this could have happened," Glandt said. "Our deficiencies were so minor. How could they have overlooked all the glorious things that SEAS has to offer?"
Glandt added that the decision was a complete slap in Engineering's face.
"That was very, very sneaky of those accreditors. ... I mean, who do they think they are? We're the 29th best engineering school in the whole country, dammit," he fumed at a press conference yesterday.
Glandt refused to answer further questions and requested that The Daily Pennsylvanian never contact him again. He then began to cry.
In its report -- which was made public yesterday -- ABET listed a number of problems afflicting the Engineering School.
Topping its list was the fact that over three-quarters of SEAS professors refuse to speak English in the classroom. While there is no formal language requirement for SEAS students, many say they spend their elective credits taking Chinese and Hindi so that they can get by in their Engineering courses.
The other primary cause was the school's failure to provide students with opportunities to hone real-world social skills.
"Once they graduate and go on to work in labs and engineering firms, they will have to know how to speak to other people. And students at your school simply did not demonstrate they were capable of this," the report read.
The report went on to mention that SEAS had inadequate methods for obtaining feedback -- the criterion which ABET representatives had focused on earlier in the semester -- but admitted that this was no big deal.
"Oh, we just add that feedback thing for fun," ABET Director Daniel Hodge said. "We don't really know what it means, and neither do the engineering schools."
While most SEAS students agreed that they would have to transfer, they did not know how they would fit the application process into their busy schedules.
"I already spend 23 hours a day in class. When am I going to have time to apply to other schools?" said Engineering junior Ben Weinberg, who was abroad last semester and was not aware of Penn's accreditation woes until this point.
Utterly 'deficient' - Every single part of Penn's Engineering School will lose its accreditation - Every professor, class and student will be named 'deficient' by the major engineering-school accreditor - Basically, Engineering sucks
