Poor maths skills failing UK engineering students

UK students' poor maths skills could result in the UK's future engineers trailing behind the other countries, according to the findings from a recent survey.

UK students' poor maths skills could result in the UK's future engineers trailing behind the other countries, according to the findings from a recent survey amongst professors and lecturers in UK university engineering departments.

The report, conducted by MathSoft Education and Engineering, authors of the market leading mathematical software packages Mathcad and StudyWorks, and their distributor Adept Scientific, highlighted that students continue to drop out of engineering university courses at high rates and difficulty mastering maths is a major reason cited by professors for this high attrition rate.

Worryingly, a staggering 82% of the lecturers surveyed feel that mathematics skills in engineering undergraduates have worsened over the last ten years.

However, the UK can take some comfort from the fact that it is not alone in suffering from this decline.

Lecturers in France (79%); Germany (63%); Denmark and Italy (55% each); and Australia (52%) also thought that maths skills were slipping in their country.

The findings counter the widely held view that students in other countries benefit from higher standards of secondary education.

"The level of mathematics and science taught in schools has deteriorated significantly over the past 10 years and students now have a much poorer entry understanding of the fundamentals than 10 years ago" said Dr Osvaldo M Querin from the School of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Leeds.

"As a lecturer it seems that we are now faced with teaching 1st year undergraduate students mathematical skills which used to be taught in secondary school but which appear not to be taught now." In the survey, professors estimated that 45% of the students that they had taught did not receive the secondary school fundamentals needed for undergraduate engineering studies.

Respondents said that "difficulty mastering maths" was the second most common cause for a student to drop out of an engineering course, but "poor study habits" or "social distractions" was the number one reason stated by 39% of respondents.

Prospective engineers are selecting other subjects to study, and this trend is also reflected in the US where engineering firms have been facing a shortage of engineers for the past decade forcing them to look outside the US to find qualified engineers.

The question is whether they will be able to find them in the UK.

"We need to look at better ways to prepare today's students to become tomorrow's engineers," said Chris Randles, Chairman and CEO, MathSoft Engineering and Education, "Our survey focused on identifying the views of higher education professors towards the difficulties the engineering profession is facing.

Looking at all the findings, it is clear that we need to improve the ways in which we educate our students at high school and college, particularly in maths, and find ways to make engineering more attractive ? there is much more potential to apply the latest in software, Internet and learning technologies to achieve these goals." Despite these difficulties mastering some elements of the course, students choosing engineering studies in the UK do so mainly due to the perception that it will lead to a good job with good security as do the US, French and Italian students.

In Australia, Denmark and Germany it is an affinity with maths/science or invention which is the main reason for students choosing engineering courses and lecturers do not believe that students select courses for prestige or future compensation.

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