(197f) Checking the Bridge: Analysis of Grading and Structural Changes within Bridge Courses on Student Access to the Chemical Engineering MS

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (2023) has projected an 8% year-on-year growth in demand for chemical engineers–a much faster rate of growth than the average for all occupations (3%). This is in part due to how chemical engineers fit into addressing many of the societal goals the US prioritizes, from decarbonizing energy and developing greener food and water sources, to medical and health innovation and sustainable manufacturing. However, the rate of growth in the degrees awarded over the past 10 years (2012 to 2021) is not enough to keep with this demand, averaging 4.2% and 1.5% year-on-year growth for BS and MS degree completions, respectively in the US (Data USA, 2024). To address this need, our department has developed a program to allow non-chemical engineering undergraduates to access the chemical engineering MS by taking two “bridge” courses in their first term. This bridge course acts as a condensed post-baccalaureate overview of the undergraduate curriculum designed to prepare these students to access the graduate core chemical engineering courses by covering six topics in chemical engineering: chemical engineering math; material and energy balances, and controls; transport phenomena; thermodynamics; separations; and kinetics and reactor design.

Since Fall 2013, we have offered this bridge pathway to the MS, which has evolved over the years to better prepare our students in the program and to reflect changes that we have made to our undergraduate curriculum. We have also changed the grading scheme dramatically in 2022–moving from a traditional homework and exam-based assessment to a competency-based scheme–to better align the grading measures with the intents of the course: to prepare students to engage in graduate-level chemical engineering coursework by building their competency in undergraduate concepts. In the most current iteration, students who demonstrate competency in all course modules, by completing practice sets with over 95% accuracy, earn an A, with unlimited attempts to do so by the end of the course.

In this presentation, we share what we learned from our evaluation of these bridge courses, and check to see whether we are meeting the goal of facilitating competency in undergraduate chemical engineering skills and providing access to our graduate curriculum. We conducted a retrospective analysis on student grades in our MS program, and compared the performance of students in our graduate core courses who have and have not participated in these bridge courses from Fall 2018 through Spring 2024. We found mixed results in this analysis, where regular and bridge MS students performed statistically similarly in graduate Transport and Thermodynamics, but their performances were statistically different in graduate Math and Kinetics core courses (with regular students outperforming bridge students by 0.3-0.6 standard deviations). This statistical difference does not appear every year, however, and changes in the grading scheme (from traditional to competency-based grading) did not have a negative effect student grades in core courses. We also have compared the grade performance of students in the bridge courses to their performance in future graduate core courses and do not find that the bridge course grades are a strong predictor of future grades in the program.

The results of our analysis are shared to help show other departments interested in broadening access to their graduate programs how they may be able to do so, and to learn from our experiences running these bridging courses for over a decade. By checking our bridge, we continue to improve access to our own programs; adjust how we advise and support MS students who enter from outside of chemical engineering; and adapt how students experience and use these bridge courses to succeed in achieving a chemical engineering MS, allowing them to take advantage of the increasing job opportunities for graduates in our field that is expected over the next decade.