Evaluating Engineering Problem Solving Skills of First-Year Engineering Students

Students in our Introduction toEngineering course sequence at the University of Arkansas often tell us, "we know all of this already."Therefore, in the Fall Semester of 2009, we administered a pre-test during the first week of Introduction to Engineering I covering the engineering problem solving topics to be covered during the semester.These topics included engineering problem solving fundamentals, statics, statistics, and engineering economics.The results show that students did not "know this all ready" but did learn it sufficiently.