A Survey on the Attributions of Students’ Exam Performance

Abstract

A peculiar tendency has been recently observed in the training process of would-be engineers. Passing Mathematics and the majority of the core subjects means such hard work for our students that only few of them are able to fulfill the requirements in the current semester when the subjects should be completed. A direct consequence of this phenomenon is that the number of students signed up for these subjects accumulates in the 2nd and the 3rd semester and as a result, compared to a normal situation, a multiplied number of engineering students wants to do, redo and ‘re-redo’ the above mentioned subjects. Our survey tends to have a picture about how engineering students think about this phenomenon, the underlying reasons for their exam performance, how much the reasons are affected by the results of the exams, the personal factors and the amount of time spent in higher education. The calculated ranking order of attributions has been compared to the results of another similar survey undertaken among the students of the Humanities at Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest in 1998-99.