2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This work-in-progress empirical research paper presents the preliminary findings about how racially minoritized students experience engineering classroom exams in college. While there have been continual performance gaps and different education outcomes between students from racially minoritized backgrounds and racial majorities in engineering in the US, there is a dearth of research considering the problem from the students’ perspective on how they are assessed. Engineering faculty typically receive little training about how to develop and administer assessments that effectively and fairly allow students to demonstrate what they know and can do. As a result, underlying bias may be present in classroom exams and students from different cultural groups are affected by such bias disproportionately. Understanding how students from different racial and cultural groups experience engineering classroom exams yields insights into assessment fairness and helps to reveal and eliminate bias. As long as there is little understanding about how fair or unfair engineering classroom assessments are and what specifically disadvantages certain groups of learners, students will suffer the consequences every day.

Our research question is: How do racially minoritized students experience engineering classroom exams in college? We examine students' exam experiences from the lens of hidden curriculum. We conducted four semi-structured interviews with racially minoritized engineering students in a large, predominantly White institution (PWI). The interviews focus on how racially minoritized students prepare for, experience, and perform in their college engineering classroom exams, tests, and quizzes. Data will be analyzed using thematic analysis.

Our preliminary finding identify hidden curriculum in three areas related to engineering classroom exams. We found that instructors often provide unclear, insufficient, or unrelated instructions to students in terms of how to study for exams. Additionally, instructional practices around exams impose implicit expectations on the financial and social resources students have available. Finally, exam content sometimes assess knowledge at a more difficult level or evaluate competencies that are unseen in practice or homework questions. Such practices contain implied messages creates advantages for students with sufficient financial and social resources that racially minortized students frequently do not have at PWIs, contributing to the disparities in achievement. Our future work will focus on interviewing more students across multiple institutions and engineering disciplines to yield insights and inform recommendations to more equitable practices around engineering classroom exams.