2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In an earlier (separate) study (work in progress), we investigated the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Applied Mathematics (APMA) courses in the Engineering School at our institution. An IRB approved survey was completed by students who took at least one course in APMA during Spring 2020, Fall 2020, and Spring 2021. It was shown that students chose CR/GC/NC (credit or no-credit option as opposed to a conventional letter grade), which was offered at our institution during those semesters, more frequently for APMA courses than for Major related courses. Our hypothesis is that students were not confident in performing well in their APMA course(s) and, therefore, didn’t want to harm their GPA. We also found it plausible that they would rather spend more time studying for their major courses.
Now we are extending our analysis with data received from the undergraduate registrar office regarding the students who have completed the survey. We have access to their grades, GPA, major, and demographics. Our goal is to identify patterns and correlations between data we received from the undergraduate registrar office and the survey we conducted on the same engineering school students months ago. In order to do so, we will aggregate data from the two sources (survey and registrar office), and match school records with the survey of each student participating. We will use unsupervised statistical methods to identify patterns in students' grading choices.
We expect to be able to identify students with low math confidence (i.e. selecting credit no-credit option even when they would have got a good letter grade) so that the School can design remedial strategies to increase these students’ confidence and performance.
In addition, we plan to analyze corresponding data available from similar programs/options at other institutions to find out any significant or relevant pattern.
Finally, in Fall 2022, our Institution is offering, due to an exceptional issue, the option CR/GC/NC once again. This time students will be able to decide whether to select the CR/GC/NC option AFTER they receive the final grade. We expect that only those who really need the CR/GC/NC option will select it, and we can compare Fall 2022 selections with the choices made in other semesters, when students had to select the option before the end of the term. This will give a clear outlook on students’ perception of APMA courses and we plan to use it for a supervised statistical analysis.