2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This paper is a research paper submitted to the Faculty Development Division of the American Society of Engineering Education.

The Grade Point Average (GPA) is a widely used metric in higher education to evaluate student performance, with applications ranging from scholarship eligibility and course prerequisites to program enrollment and graduation requirements. Employers also frequently consider GPA when assessing candidates for internships or job opportunities. Additionally, grade distribution is often used by instructors and administrators to evaluate teaching effectiveness and faculty performance. However, comparing distributions across courses can be challenging, leading to an over-reliance on simplified metrics like the DFW rate, which reflects the percentage of students receiving grades of D, F, or withdrawing (W). While useful, this metric has limitations. For instance, not all courses use D as a passing grade, and the DFW rate doesn’t capture the full range of student performance (e.g., whether students predominantly earned As or Cs). While substantial research highlights both the strengths and shortcomings of GPA as a predictor of academic success, one notable limitation is its failure to account for courses from which students withdraw before the drop deadline.

At ________ University, the College of Engineering and Science (COES) offers thirteen undergraduate degree programs: seven in engineering, two in engineering technology, and four in math and science. Students are allowed to attend two-thirds of a course during a term before formally withdrawing, which can significantly affect the DFW grade distribution for courses in COES. This study explores an alternative metric that accounts for withdrawn courses to provide a more comprehensive assessment of student performance in particular courses. This alternative metric is a modified form of the GPAW metric as developed by Manteufel et al.[1] and is applied to a course grade distribution to provide a more granular measure of a course's grade distribution to better assess student performance.

This paper additionally presents the findings of a survey conducted among instructors teaching courses within the COES at __________ University. The survey collects detailed insights into instructors' perspectives on several key factors: the overall quality of students, the perceived difficulty of the courses they teach, and their assessment of the effectiveness of their instructional methods. With an approximately 57% participation rate, the survey results are analyzed in relation to the alternative metrics for evaluating student performance and course grade distribution. The result showcases the course metric versus student quality, with instructor opinions integrated into a plot. By mapping instructor opinions to these alternative measures, the study highlights how factors like course difficulty and instructional effectiveness correlate with the alternative measures. This approach offers a different perspective for understanding academic outcomes, moving beyond traditional GPA and DFW metrics. The findings provide a foundation for refining course design, instructional practices, and performance assessments, with implications for enhancing both teaching effectiveness and student success in COES.