2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

A substantial work-in-progress among engineering programs across the country for many years, if not decades, has been the struggle to retain students who progress efficiently to graduation at the undergraduate level within 4 to 6 years. There are numerous and complex factors which affect retention calculations, with some not so easily measurable and thus even possibly quite debatable. Many in academia even discount some of the RPG (retention, progression, graduation) results due to a variety of reasons that severely affect RPG rates, such as: changing majors, transferring to another college, co-oping, among countless others. Regardless, a plethora of efforts have been explored to ameliorate the challenge of increasing high-quality engineering graduates, while at the same time not diminishing the academic rigor nor experiencing grade inflation. This struggle is often a delicate balance at most engineering institutions between faculty and administration, where both seek to identify the best practices and solutions for a problem that has persisted for a significant amount of time. Moving into a post-Covid world, what are some best strategies for maintaining such high-quality learning effectiveness? This is key especially given the rapidly and continually evolving technologies such as AI and numerous blended modalities of course delivery for vastly more flexible and diverse student populations. This work-in-progress paper will explore a variety of solutions employed and time tested from a rather large engineering college of almost 6000 total students at an R2 university, including a significant change to how the introduction to engineering discipline courses have transitioned.
Over many years it has been completely manifest and realized that all students have various learning styles where we seek to provide the diverse and flexible instruction delivery methods along with applicative hands-on learning opportunities for all. In the process, various technologies are explored where we also seek to stay abreast of the new tools becoming available. In addition, often alternative grading strategies and other best practices learned have been employed. One aspect of this work-in-progress paper will be to analyze the effects on success a particular alternative grading strategy has had on potentially serving as an additional key indicator to increased RPG and graduation rates. How students choose to engage technology with their engineering courses and the resulting outcomes to student success will also be addressed. Whether it be attending classes F2F (Face to Face), completely online via a Zoom and/or TEAMS platform, or through a hybrid, blended approach. Utilizing such evolving technologies for course delivery has been experimented with by this author for over a decade plus, from early versions of Horizon Wimba in 2008, to Collaborate and Covid influences, among many others. This paper will analyze results from data collected on how each modality of attendance students choose affected overall course grade averages. Additional feedback from the students will also be examined via input they provided through anonymous opinion polls.
The demand for having further engineering graduates is pervasive across the country. In fact, prior to 2009, in the state of Georgia, there was only one other public institution offering undergraduate degrees in traditional engineering (CE, ME, and EE). Other states have also demonstrated that additional and increasing opportunities in engineering continue to expand our discipline with strength, while also continuing a legacy of strong programs historically elsewhere. At the same time, a focus on quality and quantity in preparing the future of balanced engineers, as with the recent ASEE theme of T.I.E - The Integrated Engineer is certainly a very desirable and worthy goal to pursue. Many institutions offer a variety of common first year experience (FYE) intro courses. We recently discontinued our decades long discipline specific introductory courses to engineering and engineering technology such as EE 1000, ME 1000, ECET 1000, and the like by replacing them with a common FYE ENGR 1000 course. Students then select in a subsequent semester a discipline specific 1001L lab course to take. In 2023, we started to offer a 1 hour overview of all engineering majors followed by a 1 hour discipline specific course in 2024, among many other ideas for seeking to enhance RPG rates. This is a tremendously collaborative undertaking involving faculty and staff from all the engineering and engineering technology majors. Hopefully, this will also serve to further enhance the awareness of the strengths for both Engineering Technology degree programs as well as Engineering programs. This paper will also begin to analyze the early effects of this new approach and curriculum change to our RPG rates, along with the challenges, unexpected obstacles, and creative solutions encountered.

This WIP research will primarily focus on exploring whether a particular decade long "contract grading" technique used in the EE 1000 course was helpful for RPG rates and can serve as an indicator for such RPG rates moving forward in the new EE 1001L. This grading technique allowed students to choose where to concentrate their efforts among many diverse opportunities and will be detailed and fully delineated further in the paper. The intent of this grading technique was to significantly lessen the stress often associated with a transition to college, as well as to reduce the concern or worry about grades. Instead, the motivation of seeking to learn complex new material was offered in a variety of ways using both traditional means such as quizzes, as well as creative methods of group work and design project-based learning.

After mining this monumental amount of data, it is anticipated that those students who were not focused on just earning a particular grade, but instead were willing to attempt a variety of these alternative learning approaches, will have a higher likelihood of a timely graduation within the confines of the RPG guidelines. Hopefully, some encouraging results for the future (both locally and beyond) will be implemented from this study, especially if the hypothesis proves true.