Assessment of professional competencies promoted by SAE formula project: the UPMRacing case

• Autores: Francisco Javier Páez, Carmen García, Miguel Ángel Álvarez, Juan José Herrero, Francisco Aparicio Izquierdo
• Localización: The International journal of engineering education, ISSN-e 0949-149X, Vol. 30, no. Extra 6 (Parte B), 2014, págs. 1720-1728
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Promoting professional competencies is becoming an issue of interest and major concern in university environments. Theassessment of individual students has usually been based on their knowledge and skills in solving problems on paper in anenvironment where time is scarce and information is restricted to the data given in the written instructions. However, the humanresource managers of the major companies rate basic professional competencies very highly in the graduates that they take on,putting less importance on the level of technical knowledge possessed at the time of they are being taken on. In 1982 engineersfrom Ford, Chrysler and General Motors in the United States, being aware of how newly graduated engineers were adapted toautomotive companies, designed a competition for universities throughout the world: Formula SAE. This competition involvedconceiving, designing, manufacturing and competing with a formula-type vehicle. In 2003 the University Institute for AutomobileResearch (UPM—INSIA), was set up as the first Spanish Formula SAE competition team, called UPMRacing. The aim of thispaper is the assessment of the professional competencies promoted by the Formula SAE project in individual students participatingin the UPMRacing team. The compeTEA questionnaire#has been selected to assess competencies in the context of theUPMRacing team. This questionnaire has been applied to the team members in two milestones: when they start their participation(initial stage), and after they compete. Results conclude that this learning activity increases the professional competencies in asignificant way, mainly in case of the students with the lowest level of professional competencies in the initial stage. Additionally,the main deficiencies identified in the participating students were the acquisition of organisational and planning competencies.