A Study Of Predictive Factors For Success In Electrical Engineering

Many electrical engineering programs require foundations classes that are a hindrance to students attempting to enter the field of engineering. If we could identify the factors that lead to student success, we would be better able to advise students, or perhaps re-shape the curriculum, in ways that would promote success and ease the path towards graduation. In this paper we considered numerous candidate predictive factors for academic success in our foundations class, Electrical Engineering Fundamentals. We used the final course grade as the metric of academic success. The candidate factors that we found to be the most predictive are the students’ college-level grade point average (GPA), their grades in the pre-requisite courses, their scores on an assessment quiz covering pre-requisite course material, and math readiness as measured by the Math Placement Test taken by incoming freshmen. Other candidate factors that we considered are the amount of time that has elapsed since the pre-requisite courses were taken, students’ high-school GPA, Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores, and whether the students enrolled as freshmen or transfer students. Each candidate factor was compared to the success metric using both linear and rank correlation. Additionally, conditional mean values for the success metric were computed.