HOW WELL PREPARED MATHEMATICALLY ARE OUR ENGINEERING STUDENTS WHO TRANSFER FROM AN ORDINARY DEGREE INTO AN HONOURS DEGREE

Abstract

Students who have received a C3 (55%) or higher in Higher level mathematics in the Irish Leaving Certificate (the terminal secondary examination in Ireland) may enter directly onto a 4-year Honours degree in engineering. Students who have not achieved this level of mathematics have the option of entering onto a 3-year Ordinary degree(Level 7). Upon completion of this students may progress to the third year of the Honours degree. Relatively little work has been done on the transition(articulation) from an Ordinary degree to an Honours degree and in particular the mathematical preparedness of these students. In the third and fourth year of many Honours engineering courses within the DIT it is not unusual to have 30-50% of the students coming from an Ordinary degree background. The majority of these students come from within the DIT while others transfer in from other Institutes of Technology in Ireland. Previous work has shown that students from an Ordinary degree background are more than twice as likely to fail mathematics in their third year of the Honours degree when compared with students who have proceeded directly through an Honours degree programme. In this study we analyse students’ performance across all subjects and examine if there is a relationship between mathematical performance in the final year of the Ordinary degree and overall performance across all subjects in the third and fourth year of the Honours degree. In addition, a similar comparison is made with these students mathematics grade on entry to first year and whether this is a determining factor in their success in the in the Ordinary degree and their ability to transfer to the Honours degree.