Evaluating the Impact of Curriculum Redesign on Structural Complexity and Student Progression in First-Year Engineering Programs

This research-to-practice full research paper analyzes the impact of a first-year engineering curriculum redesign on structural complexity and student progression. Grand Valley State University (GVSU) recently redesigned the freshman engineering curriculum, replacing a two-course (6 credits) sequence with a five-course (7 credits) sequence. These modifications altered the prerequisite structure for upper-level courses. Notably, the redesign focused primarily on instructional complexity without considering its impact on overall structural complexity. This study aims to quantify the change in structural complexity as a result of the redesign and evaluate its impact on students' timely progression through the curriculum. The structural complexity of five engineering majors was determined using an open-source software both before and after the redesign. Additionally, the time taken to reach a common destination course at the sophomore level, Microcontroller Programming and Applications (EGR 226), was analyzed. Data were collected from 50 randomly selected students across two cohorts, Fall 2018 and Fall 2019 (old sequence), and Fall 2023 and Fall 2024 (new sequence). The time taken to reach EGR 226 was measured for three groups of students: all students, calculus-ready students, and non-calculus-ready students. Results show that while the redesign increased structural complexity and was associated with a decline in freshman retention, it did not significantly affect time to progression for most student groups. Statistical analyses confirmed no significant differences across cohorts and no significant interaction effects between curriculum redesign and calculus readiness.