Engineering Student Success based on Performance in First Semester Foundational Courses

Student success in engineering programs is known to be heavily impacted by incoming student preparedness and highly correlated to performance in first-semester technical courses such as math, physics, chemistry, and programming. Recent years have seen changes in the types and predictive power of incoming student preparedness information, as a result of the movement toward test-optional admission criteria. This paper presents a quantitative study of current and longitudinal data regarding success in the University of Kentucky Pigman College of Engineering as a function of first semester performance, including how that performance has changed post-Covid overall and within key demographic groups. Three analyses are presented: 1) 6-year graduation within the Pigman College of Engineering as a function of grades in first semester math courses, grouped into six clusters and evaluated longitudinally for trends; 2) 6-year graduation within the Pigman College of Engineering as a function of grades in all first semester foundational courses, focusing on which are the most predictive indicators; and 3) Differential college / university graduation as a function of grades in first semester foundational courses. Results of the analyses indicates that math grades in first semester classes are, as expected, strongly predictive of 6-year graduation, and that those grades on average are rising, with a slightly increasing percentage of students in the high-performing groups and a slightly decreasing percentage of students in the low-performing groups. Differential college/university graduation retention numbers suggest that there are a small number of moderately-low performance indicators which are able to identify students who are much more likely to have academic success in fields outside of engineering. Outcomes from these analyses include new mechanisms for early identification of at-risk students, for whom specialized advising and success coaching would be beneficial, as well as the development of new curricular planning options for students who are not yet calculus ready in their first semester and would benefit from customized curricular planning to support better first-year performance.