A Statistical Analysis of the Performance of First Year Engineering Students at UNSW Canberra and the Impact of the State where They Undertook Year 12 Study

UNSW Canberra at the Australian Defence Force Academy is a unique institution in Australia as it attracts its undergraduate students from all Australian states and territories more or less in accord with the distribution of the Australian population. Each course at UNSW Canberra is then made up of a cohort of students who have undertaken secondary education in the different states and territories but who, at university, are undertaking the same course with the same assessment as one another. This allows some comparison to be made as to how the various state and territory secondary education systems have prepared them for their tertiary study at UNSW Canberra. In this paper we conduct a preliminary analysis of the performance of UNSW Canberra engineering students in the first year, first semester courses Engineering Mathematics 1A and Engineering Physics 1A. The results obtained thus far demonstrate that while there is little difference in performance between students from most states and territories, performance of students from one state is well below that of the others.