Strategies for progressing through engineering

Entering university courses is often based on a single score or percentile ranking obtained at the end of high school. For entrance into university engineering courses the situation is complicated because many of these faculties have to accept students with lower entrance scores than recommended to fill quotas. Historically, students with borderline entrance scores have shown great difficulty during their first year in the engineering degree program. The challenge which faces many universities is that of balancing students’ performance in first year, where subjects are familiar from their high school experience, with minimising the shock which will await them when commencing second year, where their subjects are engineering based often with industrial applications. At Swinburne University of Technology, a system of learning strategies has been tried to improve student success in their studies during their second year. Students were directed to analyse, ponder, and evaluate class problems in a real-world manner. Project work was utilised to encapsulate as much of the subject material into a single meaningful engineering task.