Abstract:

There is an increasing interest among most university-level educators in improving the quality of the educational programmes in which they are involved. It is generally agreed that efficiency and success rates are two important parameters to evaluate the quality of an educational programme. Actually, the current convergence process in the structures of European high education systems is being accompanied, in parallel, by a redesign of many educational programmes. Within this redesign, expected rates of graded students must be indicated. For this reason we have studied the evolution of efficiency, success and absent rates for Electrical and Electronic Engineering student at the Escuela Universitaria de Ingeniería Técnica de Telecomunicación (EUITT) from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in the last 6 academic years. In the context of this work we mean by efficiency rate the ratio of the number of students that pass a given course divided by the number of students enrolled on that course. The success rate is the ratio of the number of students that pass a course divided by the number of students that assessed in any way. Finally, the abandon rate is the number of students that are not evaluated in a course, for any reason (they do not follow the programmed activities and/or they do not make the final exam), divided by the number of students enrolled in that course. We have focused on the common subjects for all students in order to have a representative student population. These common subjects cover the first and second semesters and a significant part of the third semester of the Electrical and Electronic Engineering course in the way this is organized at EUITT. Although each subject has its own peculiarities, there are some common characteristics in the evolution of the studied parameters: a) the mean success rate is almost constant during the studied period; however b) the efficiency rate shows a decaying tendency and, on the contrary, c) the abandon rate has a growing trend.

Keywords:

efficiency rate, success rate, graduation rate, subject drop out rate.