Attract talented Engineering students to Mathematics

The idea was to attract talented Engineering students by:

• Improving the quality of teaching in the initial Mathematics courses on the first two years Engineering programs,
• Introducing more advanced and more recent topics showing Mathematics as a fast developing area in actuality,
• Offering honors courses for students wishing to learn more deeply the subjects of official courses,
• Increasing the challenges of problem solving and concept understanding proposed to students,
• Organizing Seminars on current Mathematics topics for students,
• Using oral exams for students with top grades in written exams, as challenging and motivational occasions,
• Opening visible opportunity paths for career development in Mathematics,
• Encourage talented students to take their PhDs abroad at top universities in Mathematics, instead of remaining in Portugal counting for the IST Mathematics Department PhD output and contributing to strengthen the established Department faculty curriculum vitae.

The requirement that the best students (>17/20 in written exams) in a course to take an oral exam to decide the final grade from 20, 19, 18, 17, was introduced for the first time ever at IST immediately in 1983/84 in the courses Mathematical Analysis III and IV, and it was later on adopted in other basic Mathematics courses. Before, oral exams were either not used at all or were used for the almost opposite purpose of deciding pass or fail of a course for students with fail but close to passing grade (8/20 or 9/20) in written exams. The new practice played a very important role in motivating interest and attracting talent to Mathematics. The oral exam was designed as a conversational occasion of the student with professors for a little more than 1 hour assessing what the student could do with what had been learned in the course when confronted with interesting fertile problems new to them; it was not aimed at assessing comprehension of the material taught, what was assumed to be done with the written exams. These oral exams proved to be very effective to arise the interest of the best students in Mathematics; many students who later became Professors in the IST Department of Mathematics took these oral exams enthusiastically and felt very happy to take them. It was seen by the best students as a desired prize worth the effort for getting it, it signaled promising talent, and it was an opportunity for Professors to relate directly with top students and get to know them better. Oral exams are a time consuming task for the faculty dedicated to few students, but offering them for top students placed the extra effort were it is most worth.

Trivializing course teaching and approval does not contribute to motivate the best students, but to bore them. The advancement of knowledge enterprise is an issue of maximizing exceptional success and not of good averages or minimal requirements.