Abstract:

There is widespread concern in all universities regarding the decrease of the enrollment by the students, as well as due to the high dropout rates that occur in the first year of some degree courses.

In this work, it is presented a study carried out at the School of Civil Engineering of Technical University of Madrid, which focused on tuition data of New Students in the University System (ENI in Spanish) for the academic course 2012/13, according to data collected from the University Information Integrated System (SIIU in Spanish) and total students in the records of the different first year subjects of the degree. In our opinion, it is also interesting to take into account the differences observed between the male and female students, because according to the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports (Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte) for the academic course 2012/13, the proportion of female students in the Engineering and Architecture area is much lower than the male students, being slightly higher than 26%.

Other factors analyzed in this study have been the different continuous evaluation methods applied in every subject, on the basis of the information collected from the corresponding Learning Guides. The results obtained highlight the need for institutional actions that stimulate the implementation of solutions to the identified problems.

Keywords:

Engineering, Absenteeism, Dropout, Female students, Academic performance, First University year.