Students’ Incoming Quality and Outgoing Performance: The Case of Engineering Graduates

The technology of cognitive and non-cognitive skills formation is characterized by the cumulative nature of learning processes and by the presence of significant complementarity and irreversibility in the acquisition of such skills [Cunha and Heckman, 2007]. From this it follows that, in order to evaluate the quality of individual phases of skills formation, it is necessary to take account of the quality of the human capital entering the training process. It is evident that this aspect is more important, the more advanced the level of education. This paper evaluates the effects of the quality of matriculates at 24 engineering faculties measured with the results of the CISIA standardized test on the regularity of university studies. The preliminary results confirm that failing to take account of the incoming quality of students may give rise to significant distortions in the evaluation of the academic productivity of universities.