Factors affecting engineering student success : A South African perspective

Worldwide at universities student success is high on the agenda; the priority is to introduce interventions to enhance throughput while maintaining high-quality teaching standards. In engineering faculties, we are experiencing pressure to educate and graduate more engineers in the minimum time. In South Africa, where the demographics of our student population have changed in the last ten years, we are facing new challenges in dealing with engineering students from diverse backgrounds. There is a need to reflect on what we have learned in the last 24 years after becoming a democratic republic and to use these lessons in thinking strategically for the future. For this paper we did a systematic literature review to identify factors that have contributed to student success for South African engineering students since 1994. A hundred and forty-nine South African engineering-related papers were identified for the systematic literature review. These were critically evaluated for relevance and reduced to a sample set of 33 papers used for identification of factors contributing to student success. Our results are presented from the school, student, lecturer, university, government and accreditation stakeholder perspective and include themes such as student selection, student support and teaching and learning practices.