ASSESSING GRADUATE ATTRIBUTES AS COMPONENTS OF ARCHITECTURE EDUCATION

Abstract

Professional institutions around the world equip students with attributes required for their specific professional field. There are different admission criteria including various psychological tests for examining the intelligence and aptitude of the prospective candidates. These psychological tests examine students for their behavioral, logical, spatial, semantic and mathematical reasoning skills. The examination of these aspects in these categories help the institutes in selection of suitable candidates. In India, students essentially need to undertake one of the two national-level entrance examinations – the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Mains - Paper 2 or the National Aptitude Test for Architecture (NATA). Architecture education prepares students globally, to face issues related to the built environment. Formal architecture education emerged as a creative field requiring abilities of imagination, three- dimensional visualization of different forms along with knowledge of aesthetics and technical expertise of different subjects like building sciences, construction, structures and verbal-graphical-communication skills essential for the stability and sustenance of the building design in the profession. The components of architecture education have been classified by eminent scholars in various stances as design, knowledge and skills. The current research deals with the process of firstly, the enquiry of the expected graduate attributes of students of architecture education. This is done by reviewing various documents of eminence, worldwide. The derived graduate attributes ensure the similarities and differences in architecture education globally. Secondly, the graduate attributes are coded as per the mentioned components of architecture education, as design, knowledge and skills. The two consecutive studies ascertains that the expected graduate attributes are in alignment with the components of architecture education and with the aspects examined in various tests of intelligence and aptitude.