Tracking Student Success in Order to Assess the Instructor Effectiveness to Improve Student Retention and Graduation Rates

This paper explores the metric of follow-on student success that can be considered when evaluating an instructor’s effectiveness. The metric is the follow-on course success rate which should be useful in engineering since many fundamental courses are prerequisites to follow-on courses. For example, students who pass thermodynamics 1 should be able to pass thermodynamics 2. The data shows that the follow-on success rate depends on the instructor who teaches the first course. As more universities focus on student retention and graduation rates, they should investigate metrics to gauge how well an instructor prepares students for subsequent academic success. This paper looks at course follow-on success rate in a two-semester sequence of thermodynamics courses.