The association between metacognition, teaching quality and student attitude in 950 students of the engineering programs of the University of Cartagena between 2014 and 2016 was analyzed. The instrument for measuring metacognition was the "Learning Self-Regulation Inventory" designed by Lindner, Harris and Gordon (1993), which was modified for the requirements of the research. Teaching quality was evaluated by means of a survey and the student attitude was evaluated by means of a survey incorporating elements of Boza & de la O Toscano into the questionnaire. Each instrument was validated by the Cronbach's Alpha which yielded the values of 0.90, 0.85 and 0.88 for each of the instruments mentioned previously in their order. For the relationship analysis, the variables were crossed and the bar diagrams and the 2x2 contingency tables were constructed, applying the Chi-Square independence test. The results indicate that there is a significant degree of statistical significance (p <0.05) between metacognition and student attitude (p = 0.047) at a confidence level of 95%. This means that metacognition processes are associated with attitudinal processes causing academic success in the engineering student at the University of Cartagena. It was not possible to verify statistical significance between metacognition and teaching quality.