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| Time To Graduate Study |
For years administrators of the College of Engineering as well as outside agencies have been under a misconception regarding the amount of time required by engineering students complete their undergraduate degree requirements. Credit inflation, due mainly to curriculum changes, has fueled the belief that engineers take longer to graduate than actually required.
Several years ago, our now retired Dean for Undergraduate Studies heard someone say "everyone knows it takes five years for an engineer to graduate". Having heard this comment many times, and suspecting that this statement inflated the actual time to graduate, our Dean took action. He initiated the development of a metric to determine just how long it takes to receive an engineering degree from Penn State. His primary concern was that an inflated time to graduate figure may discourage students from entering engineering, thus reducing the college's ability to recruit new students and retain current students.
This system identifies a cohort consisting of students who have graduated. Various biographical and performance data is then collected for each student. An algorithm then calculates the number of terms required for this cohort to graduate. Cohort analyses center on positive and negative influences on graduation time. Positive influences are characteristics such as membership in an honors program or honor society, enrollment in undergraduate research courses, participation in the College's Cooperative Education Program, etc. Negative influences include such things as changing major, repeating a course, taking a leave of absence, starting in a remedial mathematics or English course, etc. From the collected information, factors affecting graduation time could be identified. These factors include things such as gender, race, campus of admission, high school performance, and standardized test performance.
Depending upon the cohort selected, graduation times varied. However, the statement that precipitated the development of this system proved to be unfounded. The system found, at that time, that the average time to graduation of students enrolled in the college's four-year engineering program in 4.26 years, far better than the five years once assumed. |
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