2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at North Carolina State University has developed a two-course “bridging course” sequence intended to provide students with an undergraduate degree other than ChE (e.g. physics, chemistry, biology) with the knowledge and skills needed to be successful in ChE graduate school. Prior to the development of these courses, students without an undergraduate degree in ChE were still admitted to graduate study at North Carolina State University, but anecdotal evidence indicated the students tended to struggle in their core graduate coursework.
The overall goal of this work is to determine the impact, whether positive or negative, of bridging course sequence completion on the success of students without undergraduate ChE degrees in ChE graduate school; this work-in-progress paper intends to solicit feedback on study design from the ASEE ChE Division community. The NC State bridging courses have been offered 15 times since 2018, comprising a total of 121 enrolled students; 77 of these students went on to complete core graduate coursework at NC State. This set of 77 students comprises an experimental sample that will be compared against a cohort of 155 students who completed graduate coursework at NC State without an undergraduate degree in ChE but did not take the bridging courses (e.g. before the bridging courses were available or decided against taking the bridging courses). Comparisons intended to be made across these data sets include graduate coursework GPA (overall and only core courses) and graduation rate (for MS and Ph.D.). It will also be determined if there is any correlation between student performance in the bridging courses with their performance in later graduate coursework.