How We Teach: Chemical Engineering Electives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The AIChE Education Division's Survey Committee covered elective course offerings in chemical engineering departments in the US and Canada in the Fall 2023 survey.Results are available from 70 respondents at 69 institutions.Medians are presented here, and the mode is mentioned if it is different from the median.Institutions require that their students take two chemical engineering elective courses, one outside-of-department technical elective (mode of zero), and four total technical electives.Undergraduate-only institutions (N = 5) offer a median of 8 chemical engineering elective courses over a two-year period, with a range of 2 to 28 courses.Over the same time frame, departments with graduate programs offer a median of 3 elective courses to just undergraduate students (mode = 2), 4 elective courses to undergraduates that graduate students may take (mode = 0), and 6 graduate courses that undergraduates may take as electives (mode = 0).Elective class sizes are small, with 44% of institutions reporting a typical enrollment of under 15 undergraduate students per course and 50% reporting 15 -30 undergraduate students per course.In the past ten years, 17% of departments have converted a required course to an elective.These now-electives were most often required bioprocessing, advanced chemistry, or molecular engineering courses.More departments, 26%, reclassified technical electives as required courses in the past ten years.These now-required courses were usually process safety, programming, or statistics elective courses.Bio-, energy-, and materialstype electives were offered at over three-quarters of departments.Advanced-core and sustainability electives were the next most popular, at 60% of institutions.Process-type electives were offered in 47% of departments.In the past ten years, almost all departments created a new technical elective that has been regularly offered.Bio-type electives were the most common new elective, followed by process-type electives.Data analysis, data science, and process simulation & modeling were the only emerging topics to be covered in an elective course at half or more of the departments.Details about course titles, electives with laboratory components, minors & concentrations, and common out-of-department electives are provided in the proceedings.Comparisons were made to the results from previous surveys when possible.
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) | 0.000 | 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".