Improving the bridge: making engineering education broader and longer
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In response to the need to prepare engineers to be aware of and sensitive to the cultural, political, and social aspects of their work, McMaster University began a five-year Engineering and Society Programme in 1991. The complete technical education in a selected engineering discipline is supplemented with a set of seven courses which examine the complex interactions between technology and society. In addition, a series of focused elective courses are taken outside of the Faculty. The viability and success of the programme have been assessed through extensive surveys of in-course students, alumni and Engineering faculty members. Findings show that this Programme attracts a disproportionate number of females and, in general, students who prefer 'deep' learning. The Programme has been well received by students. Especially valued are: the freedom to take courses outside of Engineering; the learning of critical thinking, writing, and oral presentation skills; and the sense of community experienced. Overall assessment of the value of the Programme to the Faculty by faculty members is high.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.024 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.019 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.053 | 0.009 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".