Preparing Minority Engineering Students To Pass The Fundamentals Of Engineering Examination

Abstract

He is currently a NASA Administrator's Fellow, Cohort 10. He has served as Chairman of the Department of Civil Engineering for more than sixteen (16) years and as Interim Dean of the School of Engineering and Technology from 1990 to 1992. Dr. Liaw has been heavily involved in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for many years. He has planned, directed, and executed more than ten research projects at Alabama A&M University with contract values in excess of two million dollars. His current research interest is to apply nanotechnology in water and air purification systems.

Student self-assessment data: an instrument for program assessment

“…In demonstrating that their students achieve the ABET SOs, programs historically rely heavily on artifacts of student work such as performance on exams, design projects, laboratory exercises, technical writing assignments, and capstone experiences. Programs also sometimes rely on data from the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) exam (e.g., Bowen, 2010;Guarino et al, 2013;Liaw et al, 2008;Sadowski et al, 2007), facultydeveloped comprehensive exams (Lewis et al, 2010;Gnanapragasam et al, 2008;Schimmel et al, 2003;Terry et al, 2002;Varma, 2006) or concept inventories (Jorion et al, 2015).…”

“…As one of the first steps in licensure as a Professional Engineer, along with graduating from an ABET-accredited engineering program, most civil engineering programs encourage students to take the FE exam in their final semester. As a further step, many programs require students to take the FE exam (Gnanapragasam et al, 2008;Liaw et al, 2008;Plantenberg, 2008;Roney et al, 2017), and a small cohort of programs require students to pass the exam as a graduation requirement for the program (Craver et al, 2003).…”

“…FE results are used in part for program assessment by many engineering programs (Bowen, 2010;Doepker, 1999;Guarino et al, 2013;Koehn & Malani, 2005;Liaw et al, 2008;Sadowski et al, 2007;Stuart & Steinberg, 2005;Younis, 2005). Crawford et al (2021) provide general guidelines for using the FE for program assessment among other tools.…”

Department Policy and Programs that Support NCEES FE Exam Prep in Civil and Environmental Engineering

“…To further encourage and support FE exam preparation, departments have offered mock FE exams, conducted a "signing day" for students to obtain signatures for the FE application, encouraged FE exam-style questions in courses, and used the FE Reference Handbook during courses [4], [5], [6]. As no single approach is definitively linked to increased scores on the FE exam, students find that dedicating time to studying and using a variety of materials is a common and effective approach [10].…”