2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Modernization of Nuclear Engineering Undergraduate Curriculum

The nuclear engineering undergraduate program at the University of [redacted] has recently gone through a major curriculum change, following a decade-long period of stagnation in curriculum development. The first students entered the program in 2022, with the first graduations expected in the Spring of 2026.

The primary motivations for this curriculum change are:
- Increase in available faculty headcount and teaching bandwidth by approximately a factor of two since the 2012 curriculum was developed.
- Desire to establish currency and, if possible, leadership with regard to trends in the field (topical areas, cross-cutting technical skills), particularly for terminal-bachelor's graduates, including both employment trends and feedback from our External Advisory Board.
- Poor retention among first- and second-year students, both in terms of retaining course content and the program retaining the students themselves.
- Our ABET assessment process, which indicates additional focus on advanced mathematical and programming topics was needed, as well as the revised ABET Program Criterion 1 for nuclear engineering programs, particularly in the area of nuclear fuel cycles.

A major source of information for the changes was research into the programs at peer and aspirant-peer institutions. Since undergraduate rankings in NE are not available, the graduate rankings (for which there is a decade-stable top twelve) were used, with the ten programs using the same definition of credit hour used for primary comparison. The credit counts in more than thirty areas were considered, including basic math and science (calculus, chemistry, physics, etc.), engineering core (engineering mechanics, circuits, thermal sciences, programming, etc.), and nuclear engineering-specific topics (neutronics, shielding, detection, senior design, etc.) alongside general education credit minima.

The paper will detail the changes throughout our undergraduate nuclear curriculum, including:
- A reboot of the thermal sciences/hydraulics sequence
- Additional coverage of neutronics and nuclear fuel cycles
- Addition of economics content.
- Removal of courses taught outside the program, such as statistics, that were taken by students in their first years and poorly retained through the end of the program.
The effects of University- and College-wide constraints, including a prohibition on increasing the credits in an undergraduate degree and a requirement that a degree can be completed in eight regular semesters, will also be discussed.

The paper will also analyze the effects of changes in courses already taken by new-curriculum students, including:
- Transition from a 1-credit professional development course, taken at student convenience, towards a more technical 2-credit sophomore-level introductory course.
- Expansion of the coverage of relevant mathematics, programming, and topics in AI/ML from a single four-credit course to a two-course eight-credit sequence.
- The first course in the thermal engineering sequence, which includes the framework for government interaction with nuclear power.
Assessment results, including both those tied to the Student Outcomes and Performance Indicators used in our ABET process as well as course grading, will be included for these new/revised classes. The effects on student retention will also be explored, along with feedback from alumni and employers of our graduates who are members of our External Advisory Board.