Do we educate engineers that can engineer?

Since 2008, the Bachelor of Engineering education at the Technical University of Denmark has been CDIO-based, including the software technology and IT and economics study lines. Consequently, the study plans of these study lines were revised to include cross-disciplinary CDIO projects in each of the first four semesters.

These projects replaced 11 smaller, course-specific projects in the old study plans. The first three semesters contain design-build projects spanning several courses, and the fourth semester centers around a stand-alone CDIO project. These team-based projects aim at training the students’ engineering skills (CDIO competence category 4) and at improving the students’ skills in CDIO competence categories 2 and 3.

In the tenth year of operation, we now decided to investigate, how content students and employers are with our students’ engineering skills. To this end we have designed a survey to provide us with insights for improving our study lines and to address the question: “Are we educating engineers who can engineer?” The questionnaire is aligned with the CDIO syllabus and can also serve for surveying other study lines, since it is not study line specific.

To obtain meaningful results, we decided to target students who have at least passed the first four terms, and companies that have hosted a significant number of students in the last 3 years in internships or for the final thesis. These companies interact with the students for almost one year at the end of their studies, providing a good foundation for the company supervisors to answer questions about the students’ abilities as an engineer.

In this paper, we discuss the design and result of the questionnaire, and the obtained results. As mentioned above, the survey will give us and the CDIO community detailed insights as to how our students and their employers experience the result of our education.