The point of the split for Gymnasium is supposed to be to only admit those students who would successfully adapt, though. Attending college also requires passing the Abitur, which shows skill in the areas you are planning to study. A failure to understand engineering topics should show up in the topics chosen for the Abitur. (Similar to the choice of A level topics in the UK.)
Somewhat relatedly, college in Germany is more focused on the theoretical than it is in the US. A lot of engineering college programs in the US would be closer to a German technical school than a German college.
I understand. I worry that the more you lower the false positive (accepted to college but uncapable), the greater you raise the false negative (denied college path but capable).
I very much appreciated the way my public college worked. Very few who started electrical engineering finished. But they would accept damn near anyone. The few that survived had the world in their pocket.
>A lot of engineering college programs in the US would be closer to a German technical school than a German college.
Must depend on the college. My experience, as well as most my peers, was that engineering was about 60% raw mathematics. There was so much math, I only use a small fraction of it today. Maybe 10% of the engineering degree was practical labs. The engineering technology programs are maybe what you're thinking of? They flip those numbers on their head. It's hard for me to imagine any 4 year degree except mathematics and physics having more math than engineering programs I'm familiar with.
> I worry that the more you lower the false positive (accepted to college but uncapable), the greater you raise the false negative (denied college path but capable).
Sure, but if you're trying to avoid false negatives the German system is already poor. In the US work is the goal and there's a lot of talk about finding a job you love. The German system is mainly focused on minimizing the number of people who can't find work. In Germany there's also less of an income gap between professions than in the US (a German doctor or highly paid computer scientist only makes 2x what a tradesperson or retail worker makes https://www.iamexpat.de/career/working-in-germany/salary-pay...).
> My experience, as well as most my peers, was that engineering was about 60% raw mathematics.
Was the mathematics mainly proofs? My US university required a minimum of 2 classes with a significant programming project for a Computer Science degree, and many students took 6 or more courses with significant programming projects. My semester studying abroad in Germany, there was only 1 course offered that even had a serious project component. There was a heavy focus on proofs, and all the hardware architecture courses offered were entirely structured around formal verification of hardware.
>My US university required a minimum of 2 classes with a significant programming project for a Computer Science degree,
Computer Science and Computer Engineering are typically significantly different curricula. Engineering is generally part of a school of engineering. Computer science is generally in college of science. This is a generalization of course. This is purely pedantic, but most ABET engineers consider a CS major a scientist while a computer engineer as an engineer. My comments were limited to engineering programs.
To be super pedantic, because I think it's interesting: At the US the Computer Science major was in the college of Arts and the Computer Engineering major was in the college of engineering, but besides general education electives the majors only differed by 1 CSE course and 1 or 2 low-credit math courses (most CS/CE majors took the CSE courses required for both).
In Germany, the equivalent major is Informatik, which literally translates to English as Information Science but is basically Computer Science. There are some colleges that offer technische Informatik, which would be Computer Engineering, and a degree in engineering, but as far as I can tell that's rarer.
Computer Science isn't officially an engineering degree, but I definitely wouldn't consider it a science degree. The only scientific experiments were in gen ed physics courses.
Somewhat relatedly, college in Germany is more focused on the theoretical than it is in the US. A lot of engineering college programs in the US would be closer to a German technical school than a German college.