An Engine for Change - A Chronicle of the Engineering Council

1996-1998: THE RUDGE YEARS 131“establishment” body within so many Institutions, who often did not understand their ownqualification scheme and certainly had little understanding of the EngC and remainedsuspicious about what it was up to.”EngC ExaminationsAn Examinations Working Group reviewed the EngC Part 1 examination syllabus in 1996and recommended changes. It was decided in 1997 that the EngC examinations would add aPart 3 to meet the SARTOR-3 standard – the raising of exemplifying academic standard fromBEng to MEng. This amounted to an extra year of full-time study consisting of two furtherpapers from the Part 2 (A) list plus one cross-division paper on Advanced EngineeringAnalysis plus a choice of one paper from six advanced syllabi plus a project to demonstrateteam work. A Part 1 examination under the old syllabus was held finally in November 1998and the new syllabuses came into effect in May 1999.Professor Alan Bramley writes:“I was involved with the Engineering Council examinations, and after serving as a Moderatorfor a short while I was appointed as Chairman of one of its Boards.“The Engineering Council examinations were taken throughout the world, and as with anyformal examination process one had to guard against plagiarism, cheating, etc. Whilst onewould not want to venture into the jungle of overt information about the tricks that somepeople got up to, I do think that it was rather amusing that the examinations had to bescheduled to coincide with the time changes around the world. This, I think resulted in somequite bizarre arrangements whereby people were taking examinations at odd hours of the dayand night. Brian Millicent had it all worked out in some detail. The interesting thing aboutthis was the way in which information technology could have been used very effectively totransmit information from one location to another if this synchronisation process had notbeen embarked upon.”The requirements for the examination were developed by the EngC in line with theprogressive raising of SARTOR standards and hence Institution membership requirements forCEng, as we indicated in Chapter 2. Thus by 1998 the examination arrangements were:Part 1 Compulsory subjects:MathematicsEngineering MaterialsEngineering ScienceEngineering Perspectives and SkillsOptional Subjects (2 from): Mechanical and Structural EngineeringThermodynamic, Fluid and Process EngineeringElectrical and Electronic EngineeringSoftware and Information Systems EngineeringPart 2 (A)Part 2 (B)5 three-hour written examination papers chosen from a list of 27 that coveredall the main branches of hardware and software engineering.A single subject ‘The Engineer in Society’ which was compulsory.© Engineering Council UK 2004