An investigation on the student performance in first year fundamental engineering course, Engineering Statics

This paper details a quantitative investigation performed on the student performances in Engineering Statics, a fundamental engineering course. It is one of the highly numerical subjects that students encounter during early stage of their engineering programs and students are expected to complete large numbers of practice problems in order to learn the relevant theories. Historically, the success rate of the students enrolled in this subject was significantly below the average. The major cause for the higher failure rates was attributed to the lack of fundamental knowledge in mathematics. However, this study is intended to investigate the progressive performances of the students who satisfied the entry requirement and enrolled in the subject. The assessment marks were analysed against two categories such as delivery mode and the gender of the students to understand the critical causes of the outcome. Few statistical analyses were performed, and the results are presented in this paper