Course Evaluation for Low Pass Rate Improvement in Engineering Education

Abstract

A course evaluation is a process that includes evaluations of lecturers’ teaching performances and their course material moderations. These two procedures are usually implemented, whether officially by the faculty of engineering or by lecturers’ own initiatives, to help identify lecturers’ strengths and weaknesses and the ways forward to improve their performances and their qualities of teaching. This paper presents different ways of implementing these two criteria from students’ and professionals’ perspectives. Official questionnaires from the faculty of engineering, personal questionnaires using Google surveys, Moodle and special designed forms have been used for moderation and evaluations. The process of evaluation is the core of a feedback procedure followed by universities in order for them to monitor the teaching quality of their staff. Satisfactory results show that such a process can improve the lecturers’ teaching performances, courses material quality, students’ satisfaction and performances, and finally the pass rate of the class.

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“…One way is by explaining the objectives of the course and its importance in their careers. Previous studies have shown that university-wide courses such as gender studies or culture and heritage studies that are imposed on students have low pass rates compared to main subjects being undertaken by students (Cornford, 1997;Dejene & Chen, 2019;Ouahada, 2019).…”

“…While the major goal for implementing an introductory module in ICT is to equip students with IT skills, it's not guaranteed that students will grasp all the concepts in a single semester. Pressure for the exam might also lead students not to put much effort and do the module for the marks (Blazar & Kraft, 2017;Ouahada, 2019). However, continuously and frequently offering short term courses and workshops can potentially reinforce concepts learnt earlier.…”