First-year Students’ Design Projects: an Experiment to Quantify Quality in Relation to Time Involved

SUMMARY In this paper the importance of the first-year students’ design projects will be explained. In the first year, selection is made and we have to be sure that students will be able to pass the design projects in the following years. Especially within the first year's staff, a good consensus must exist, concerning the requirements which the students have to meet, to pass this selection process. Although we have laid down these requirements, still one difficult, but important question had to be answered What is the level of performance you can realistically expect from first-year students? To find an answer to this question we carried out some experiments in which we forced a group of students to follow a time scheme which we could control. We compared their results with those of another group. The differences in quality of the students' work between the two groups were astonishing. With the norms we were used to dealing with, almost all students of the controlled group would not pass our demands; it ...