Paper Authors

Abstract

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract

Session :

Curriculum Outcome Assesment using Subject Matter on the FE Examination.

Enno “Ed” Koehn, Ramakanth Mandalika

Lamar University

Abstract:

In engineering education, assessment has become a major topic as a result of the adoption of EC 2000 by The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). In particular, the utilization of a nationally-normed examination is one method recommended by the ABET criteria1. In this regard, an effective and recognized tool for assessing engineering education is the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) examination developed by the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying (NCEES). In this study, the findings of a detailed analysis of FE examination data of the students at Lamar University is conducted and presented in various forms. The investigation includes a discussion concerning the FE as an effective assessment tool and the development of a database of FE examination results. Fundamentals of Engineering examination data are presented in several forms to evaluate engineering student performance. First, a comparison of grades in individual subject areas (e.g chemistry, computers, dynamics, fluid mechanics, mathematics etc.) is conducted relative to the national average. This provides assessment information for a particular institution. Overall, the findings of the study indicate that the use of the subject matter on the FE exam to measure student performance yields considerable data for comparison purposes which may be utilized to asses and improve an engineering program.

I. Introduction:

Among the most significant obstacles facing universities, today, is related to developing quantitative measures for evaluating engineering student performance and tracking the effect of program changes in the curriculum9. Gaining faculty acceptance for the evaluation methodology utilized is also important. Here, many of the difficulties result from a lack of available uniform performance measures, across institutions. Presently, the only available uniform performance measure taken by a large number of students from many institutions is the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) examination. Unfortunately, many educators and university administrators are principally concerned with only the overall pass rate on the FE examination. Numerous institutions use this single number as a performance measure for engineering programs5,6,8. For

Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education

• Citation

• Format
  • APA
  • APA - LaTeX bibitem
  • MLA
  • MLA - LaTeX bibitem
  • Bibtex
  • EndNote - RIS

Mandalika, R., & Koehn, E. (2005, June), Curriculum Outcome Assessment Using Subject Matter On The Fe Examination Paper presented at 2005 Annual Conference, Portland, Oregon. 10.18260/1-2--14809