Engineering Students and Group Membership: Patterns of Variation in Leadership Confidence and Risk Orientation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines variance in leadership confidence and risk orientation attributes across a sample of n=1,061 senior year mechanical engineering students drawn from nine U.S. engineering schools. These attributes theoretically relate to students' development within engineering leadership educational programs and to students' career choice behaviors. Data were collected as part of a larger forthcoming study that will analyze the attributes' association with students' demonstrated engineering job and task preferences. In this paper, we introduce our conceptualization and measurement methods for the leadership confidence and risk orientation variables following a review of the related literature. We hypothesize that these attributes vary, on average, in association with observable student participation choices, such as the choice to join a fraternity/sorority or to participate in varsity athletics; we also hypothesize that the attributes vary in association with socioeconomic background and gender. We then present results demonstrating statistically significant differences in these attributes, on average, depending on students' association with one or more of such groups or demographics. Meanwhile, we find no statistically significant differences in average values of the leadership confidence or risk attributes across the universities participating in the study.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".