You're going to design an MOS circuit, and it'll be fabricated at Intel. If it works, you pass. If it doesn't, you fail,

I wish I had even one engineering class like that. Everything I had was theory and we were tested for academic ability.

  By the second session, two-thirds of the class had dropped out.

Interesting that students were obviously motivated to avoid a measurable outcome. I'm guessing the students figured that the class was too much work, and that they should choose other classes that would be easier to pass? Assumably they were all interested enough in the topic since they signed up for it and generally engineering students are interested in leading edge tech.