Quarter to Semester Transition: Lessons Learned from a Mechanical Engineering Case
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This is an evidence-based practice paper. Our university is in the process of a mandatory transition from a quarter based system to a semester based system. This involves completely transitioning our entire curriculum in a university wide effort, involving many different perspectives and opinions. In this paper, we aim to outline lessons learned from this challenging project, specifically from the perspective of the mechanical engineering program, but with applications to any major. We focus on how we approached the problem, the challenges and successes in working with other departments on our campus, and our methods of preserving the strengths of our current program, while also taking the opportunity to modernize our curriculum. Those strengths we aim to preserve include: a focus on hands-on, active learning, design experiences in each of the four years, and concentrations that allow students to develop and focus their particular interests. Struggles we have encountered include managing ever changing requirements, working across the college to standardize what we call service courses (courses that are taken by multiple majors), and managing the high unit load of our high number of lab courses. We have found success with a wide range of strategies, which we will describe in the paper. These have included a backwards design (starting with the outcomes for the students), having a small team focused on the details of the planning with frequent feedback from the department, and college wide meetings to compare work and share ideas.
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 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) | 0.001 | 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".