The author attended the Annual Assembly of the Engineering Professors' Council, held at St Catherine's College, Oxford, on 6–8 April 1998. He reports on the presentations, discussions and debates. The principal concern was the relationship between the higher education sector and engineering employers and the need for higher education institutions to recognize and deliver engineering graduates with sufficient ‘added value’ to be capable of quickly adding to the value of an engineering company. Measuring the quality of teaching and research in UK universities, a key factor in adding value to students, remains a problem area for the academic staff.
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References
1.
National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education, Higher Education in the Learning Society, HMSO, London, 1997.
2.
Guardian Higher Education, 5 May 1998, p i.
3.
A New Millenium of Learning for Engineering, Engineering Employers' Federation, London, 1997.
4.
For example, the article ‘A call for improving engineering degrees’, Occupational Standards Council for Engineering Newsletter, No 3, February 1998.
5.
Op cit, Ref 1.
6.
The fact remains, surely, that the social history of the UK over the last 400 years still militates against the attractiveness of engineering as a career: ‘manufacturing’ and ‘trade’ were, and probably still are, regarded as somehow inferior prospects as far as the landed gentry were, and are, concerned. The professions' referred to law and medicine, not to engineering.
7.
UK universities rely heavily on ‘Input Standards' — that is, the grades achieved by students from secondary schools and further education colleges in public examinations such as A-levels. Such Input Standards are unreliable as predictors of the quality of output of a degree course. The EPC definition of output refers to the standard at graduation; and ‘standard’ as the expectation of knowledge, skills and understanding.
8.
One might also question whether or not such a test would, eventually, measure rather more the candidate's ability to pass an examination, and the ability of the teachers to help their students pass, than genuine value-added from input to output — but that's another subject.
