2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The MET program at Penn State Behrend requires two engineering graphics courses as part of the first-year curricula. Students in these courses take a standardized visualization test, the Purdue Spatial Visualization Test: Visualization of Rotations (PSVTR) as part of ordinary classroom practice. Faculty in the program have begun working on longitudinal assessment of student success in the program, and previous work [authors] has compared the students’ scores on the PSVTR as first-year students and as seniors.

In continuation of the ongoing work, and in part to assess if the graphics courses should be included in the entrance to major (ETM) requirements, this paper will include data on the PSVT scores of first-year students, along with their grades in the engineering graphics courses, their grades in the currently required ETM courses, their retention in the major, and overall GPA. This is to assess if there is a correlation between visualization ability, performance in the graphics courses, and success in the major. This is a precursor to potentially including the graphics courses as part of ETM requirements.

To be eligible for ETM, a student must have a minimum of a 2.0 cumulative GPA and earned a grade of C or higher in an introductory physics course, and calculus. Although multiple courses in the major require an earned grade of C or above, none of them are currently used as ETM requirements. If the data discovered in this paper significantly correlates performance on the PSVTR and grades in the graphics courses with success in the MET major, changes to the ETM may be considered.