Mechanical Engineering

• Mission Statement
  Educate and prepare Mechanical Engineering students for successful careers. This is accomplished by the program educational objectives.
• Student Learning Outcomes
  • Certificate (Not Applicable)

     

  • Associate Degree 

    Students completing the Associate of Pre-Engineering will:

    • 1. Prepare engineering students for upper division course work in their chosen engineering majors at WSU or other institutions.
    • 2. Develop in students the ability to apply a systematic and logical process for solving fundamental engineering problems.
    • 3. Engage students in team-based activities to enhance their communication and interpersonal skills.
      
  • Bachelor Degree

    Graduates of the WSU Mechanical Engineering Program will have:

    • An ability to identify, formulate, and solve complex engineering problems by applying principles of engineering, science, and mathematics. 
    • An ability to apply engineering design to produce solutions that meet specified needs with consideration of public health, safety, and welfare, as well as global, cultural, social, environmental, and economic factors.
    • An ability to communicate effectively with a range of audiences.
    • An ability to recognize ethical and professional responsibilities in engineering situations and make informed judgements, which must consider the impact of engineering solutions in global, economic, environmental, and social contexts.
    • An ability to function effectively on a team whose members together provide leadership, create a collaborative and inclusive environment, establish goals, plan tasks, and meet objectives.
    • An ability to develop and conduct appropriate experimentation, analyze and interpret data, and use engineering judgement to draw conclusions.
    • An ability to acquire and apply new knowledge as needed, using appropriate learning strategies.

     

   
• Curriculum Grid

   

• Program and Contact Information

  Contact information:

  Dr. Daniel J. Magda

  Mechanical Engineering Dept. Chair
  Phone: 801.626.7636
  Email: dmagda@weber.edu

  1802 University Circle
  Ogden, UT. 84408-1802
  

• Assessment Plan
  The ME program uses four assessment instruments for student learning

   

  • Course Rubrics
    • When the ME program was first established in 2018, the faculty spent a great deal of effort defining a matrix of courses and student outcomes. For each course in the curriculum, a level of applicability for each student outcome was assigned. The levels of applicability are low, medium, and high, designated by a blank, M and H, respectively, in the matrix. Only student outcomes that ranked high in the matrix were assigned a perfomatnce indicator (PI) in the course rubric. Levels of applicability were assigned to courses outside the ME program as well, but none of them ranked higher than medium, so they were not connected to a PI and are therefore not shown in the matrix (Matrix can be seen in full report and in the curriculum grid above).
    • After each semester, faculty prepare a rubric for each ME course they taught by assigning a level of achievement to each PI for the student outcomes in the rubric. The levels of achievement are (1) unsatisfactory, (2) developming, (3) satisfactory, and (4) exemplary. A recent example of a course rubric is shown in Table 2 (shown in full report).
    • The process for using the rubrics to improve courses is illustrated in Figure 1 (shown in full report). The continuous improvement process for courses occurs on two levels - the course level and the program level. At the course level, the instructor makes independent improvements to the course. When the score, S, for a given PI is 3 or greater,no action is taken by the instructor to improve the course. When the S falls below 3, the instructor identifies corrective actions to implement the next time that he/she teaches the course.
    • At the program level, the instructor, with input from department faculty, makes improvements to the course. If the mean score for a given course is 2.5 or greater, no action is taken to improve the course, but a mean score of less than 2.5 suggests deficiencies in the course that require discussion and correction by the instructor and/or program faculty. For the rubric showm in Table 3 (shown in full report), the action is to be initiated by the instructor for two PIs, but no program level action is required.
    • We have been using course rubrics as a student outcome assessment instrument since hte fall semester of 2019. When a course-level trigger occurs, it is the responsibility of the faculty member to initiate action amd implement improvement in that particular course.
  • Graduate Survey
    • The graduate survey is a ten-question survey instrument administered to seniors at graduation. Each question asks graduates to indicate the degree to which the student learning outcome was achieved in their program. The responses are given on the following five-point Likert scale: 1 = strongely disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 neither agree nor disagree, 4 = agree, 5 = strongly agree. The trigger point was set by faculty at 3.5.
  • Industrial Advisory Board recommendations
    • The Industry Advisory Board (IAB) consists of program faculty and staff members, engineering manager, and engineers from local engineering companies and at least one senior ME student. The primary role of the IAB is to periodically evaluate the ME programs and make recommendations for improvement. Board members sometimes represent the companies with whom our graduates are employed, so they have a unique and direct impact on the direction and educational objectives of the program.
    • The IAB typically convenes once per year in the fall semester. Topics and issues discussed by this board include but are not necessarily limitied to the following:
      1. Review of program educational objectives
      2. Program structure
      3. Content of courses
      4. Declared majors and course enrollments
      5. Graduate projections
      6. Internship opportunities
      7. Full-time hiring projections
      8. Trends in the advancement of technology
  • Senior Assessment Exam
    • The engineering faculty decided that we needed and instrument to directly and globally assess the technical knowledge of our senior students. We discussed using the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) examination administered by the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying (NCEES). However, we did not want to be contrained by the lack of detailed score reporting, cost, and timing of the FE examination, so we designed and internal exam that resembles the FE exam. Questions similar or identical to those in the old FE review manuals were chosen to build the exam. The exam covers the following 12 topics:

      Statics	Diversity	Dynamic System Modeling
      Material Science	Mechanics of Materials	Ethics & Professionalism
      Fluid Mechanics	Machine Design	Dynamics
      Control Systems	Heat Transfer	Thermodynamics

    • The exam consists of 84 questions that students work through. It is an open book, open notes, and no time limit. Students can have two attempts where their best score is recorded. The exam counts as 40% of their grade in the scnior seminar class.

   

  New: High Impact Educational Experiences in the Curriculum

  • In response to the recent USHE requirement that all students have at least one HIEE in the first 30 credit hours and 1 HIEE in the major or minor we are asking programs to map HIEEs to curriculum using a traditional curriculum grid. This helps demonstrate how and where these goals are accomplished.

    	Department/Program use of High Impact Educational Experiences
    Courses	HIEE 1	HIEE 2	HIEE 3
    ENGR 1000	Project Based Learning	Team Based Learning
    ME 4200 Senior Project II	Project Based Learning	Team Based Learning	Research

     

  • HIEEs include capstone courses and experiences, community-engaged learning, evidence-based teaching practices, internships, project-based learning, study abroad/away, supplemental instruction, team-based learning, undergraduate research, pre-professional/career development experiences.
• Assessment Report Submissions

  2021-22 
  2019-20

• Program Review

  2021-22

  
   

This information is part of the cyclical program review process. Details such as mission statements, learning outcomes, etc., are updated as part of the biennial assessment reporting process, an integral component of program review.