Abstract:
The changing structure of student populations or cohorts over decades’
produces changing academic achievements or results. This may be due to a
number of factors, including the school education system, the political system
and the sociocultural system. The aim of this paper is to analyse the
relationship between student demographics and the academic achievement of
undergraduate engineering students over a 15-year period. A descriptive
study is used to determine the relationships between specific variables that
existed between 1998 and 2013. These variables include gender, age and
home languages of students that are contrasted to their final grade in a
compulsory Design Projects module. Students need to obtain more than 50%
to successfully complete this module, with the results indicating greater
success for students with an Afrikaans or IsiZulu mother tongue than
compared to students with a Sesotho, Setswana or Xhosa mother tongue.
Younger students, less than 21 years of age, have a higher pass rate than
older students who are more than 24 years of age. Finally, males outnumber
females by more than 3:1. However, their final overall pass rates differ by
only 3%, suggesting that both genders performed equally well in the Design
Projects module. A key recommendation is to provide additional academic
support to older students who may be struggling to synthesize knowledge and
skills from a wide number of modules.
