Assessing Senior Engineering Student’s Ability to Identify Graduate Attributes

Abstract

Universities around the world are responding to industry and accreditation body requests by embedding graduate attributes into their curricula. The Central University of Technology in South Africa has followed suit by stipulating 10 graduate attributes that academics need to cover in their curricula. It is important that engineering students be able to identify and understand these graduate attributes, as they need to demonstrate them through their entire educational career. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate which graduate attributes senior engineering students can easily identify based on their understanding of the definition. A questionnaire was used as the data-collection instrument in a descriptive case study. Senior engineering students could easily identify 8 of the 10 graduate attributes that has a word that can be linked to the definition. The graduate attribute “communication” was identified by 92% of the students while 66% identified “entrepreneurship”. However, the majority of students struggled to identify two graduate attributes, which are numeracy (6% identified it) and technical and conceptual competence (40% identified it). A possible reason for this could be that there are no words in the definition that may be linked to the name of the attribute. It is therefore recommended that all graduate attributes be defined is such a way that a synonym or antonym of the attribute be used in the actual definition. This may assist students to better identify and understand vital graduate attributes that they need to acquire before entering Industry.