Abstract:

The main premise of this paper is that university education can no longer be separated from research. Moving from high school to academic level, any young man expresses more than the desire to accumulate knowledge, more precisely, he manifests the desire to assert himself as creator of products or concepts useful to the society in which he lives and useful to the world of tomorrow. In this context, the academic environment in Romania faces an exaggerated bureaucracy, which raises barriers to adapting the teaching and evaluation processes to the requirements of the main stakeholders: students and employers. Therefore, the present paper has started with the proposal of a theoretical model of overcoming the discrepancies between three levels that is noticeable in the preparation of future specialists: the level of the educational system, the level of preparation of the academics and the level of expectations of the trained young people. To support this original model, we have presented arguments from the results obtained on a pilot study conducted at the Faculty of Engineering in Sibiu, Romania, in the academic year 2018-2019, with the students of the final year of the Mechatronics specialization. It should be mentioned that about two thirds of the study participants had a special desire to be involved in research activities. Our improvement proposals have focused on two main directions: adapting the teaching and evaluation processes to the students' wishes and needs on the one hand, and creating a normative framework for these processes less restrictive in the Romanian universities, allowing them to adapt to each group of students, or even from student to student. Only then can student-centered learning be discussed.

Keywords:

Teaching, evaluation, process, research, students.