Analysis on Engineering Mathematics I Final Exam Questions

Abstract

Exam questions need to be analyzed so that the lecturers will have a better idea on which topics that the students find problematic to understand. The overall marks just give the grade for the students. It is very important to identify the weakness of students in a subject. Thus is because Engineering Mathematics subjects are the foundation for all other engineering subjects. The objective of this paper is to analyze the final exam questions for Engineering Mathematics I. To analyze this particular subject, the results of the final examination of students from Electronic and Electrical Engineering Department, Mechanical Engineering Department, Civil Engineering Department and Chemical Engineering Department are tabulated in EXCEL and later transformed into WINSTEPS. The Rasch model enables one to differentiate the difficulties of the exam questions according to different levels of the group. The Engineering Mathematics I questions can be categorized into four groups. They are very difficult, difficult, easy and very easy. The students who sat for this final examination can be grouped into 2 groups, namely high performers and low performers. Differentiation using first principle, differentiating functions, finding minimum value, solving system of linear equations using inverse matrix, finding unit vector and finding the root of complex numbers are the difficult topics in Engineering Mathematics I. Graph sketching and stating the domain for the function, complex number, solving matrix equations are found to be the easiest topics in Engineering Mathematics I.