Wow. I think the "memorizing shit" method of learning went out of practice, ohh, about the time they invented reference books, which was way before Mines opened. And I'm not knocking hard work, but my plumber works hard too. But that doesn't make him qualified to write papers about the future of oil discoveries in any way at all, (it does make him qualified to figure out where the sewer line is leaking, or at least at the rate that he is digging, one would think he'll find something eventually.)

Seriously, if you want to defend the school, did they teach critical thinking?

Actually, I have not thought about if for a long time, but I do remember thinking of a person or two who we thought could potentially get someone killed due to a lack of common sense. However, I have a hard time believing that all engineering schools do not have the same issues to some extent. I also remember that these folks still worked pretty hard and had good analytical skills. Aguilera is possibly a good example of this. There is no doubt he has great mathematical and analytical skills and I bet he is a very hard worker, but you have to wonder about common sense when look at Figure 2 above.

I have been recently reading the text by L.P. Dake called "The Practice of Reservoir Engineering" and it really has some embarrassing passages in it. Dake appears to be a fairly careful math guy, but the way he will blurt out the fact that geologists essentially don't what is going on is pretty startling. He also references the old-timers like T.E.W. Nind who say many of the curves have "no basis in physical laws" is also kind of shocking. It is a pretty fascinating view on an engineering field that I knew was based mainly on heuristics, but to have it spelled out so clearly makes you really wonder what the heck is going on. I just can't imagine reading these kinds of textbooks in my fields of Electrical Engineering and Physics. It would be like reading texts from the 1800's where some charlatan author would discuss the topic of electricity as some sort of flow through a mysterious "ether".

Here is an excerpt from a Dake book:

The reader may feel that the physical laws governing the subject of reservoir engineering are sparse. Where, for instance is the, by now, well established “Murphy’s Law”? Since the first realisation of this law in the 1940’s - “that things go from bad to worse”, the meaning of entropy as established by the second law of thermodynamics has become a lot clearer to practical engineers. Murphy’s law is implicitly incorporated in reservoir engineering, although we do not readily acknowledge it.

The author has always believed that there should be a place in reservoir engineering for the very basic theory of physics which is (perhaps unfortunately) the Heisenberg “Uncertainty Principle” of quantum mechanics. This is not an original thought in the subject because as long ago as 1949 the ultimate reservoir engineer, Morris Muskat [13], had flirted with the same idea but concluded that:
“In its operational sense the principle of uncertainty, which is usually considered as limited to the realm of microscopic physics, constitutes the very essence of applied reservoir engineering as a science.”
An excellent thought -but what can be done about it? Nevertheless, the subject is vulnerable to change, the latest approach being the adoption of “Chaos Theory”. This would seem to be a convenient concept to hide behind in reservoir engineering but at the time of writing is still in its infancy -
thank goodness.

WTF is this guy talking about? Are these geologists on drugs or something? You just don't speculate in a textbook on sh*t you have no business talking about. What is he bringing up Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle for? This guy would get laughed out of any ordinary engineering or science classroom if he started rambling like that.

There are bunch more passages like that one which I can excerpt from but that gives you a flavor. So did CSM actually use textbooks like these? I have heard that the books by Dake are considered "classics" in the field.

Dake, L.P., “The Practice of Reservoir Engineering”, Elsevier, 2001

And this was from 2001!