2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Accelerated education refers to any attempt to speed up or compress the educational process beyond the traditional semester or quarter systems that are used in most colleges and universities. Sometimes this means simply shortening the duration of the course (e.g., from 15 weeks to 6 weeks) without changing the number of contact hours in the classroom (e.g., 40 hours). At regional land grant university, courses are offered in fifteen-week traditional semesters and summer courses are offered in shorter five-week semesters. Using a database of over 21,000 observations over a 15-year period, we investigate the link between students’ performance in post-requisite courses after taking the prerequisite course in a traditional semester versus a shorter summer semester. Students’ final grades in the mechanics course sequence of a mechanical engineering curriculum in the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering are adopted in this study. Three different analyses that relate the final student grades to the semesters the courses were attempted were conducted. The findings show that a greater percentage of students that take the prerequisite course in traditional semesters have a higher pass rate in the post-requisite courses than students who take the prerequisite course in the fast-paced semester. We also noticed that the student performance in summer or traditional length semesters courses is similar despite the difference in pace of the course.