Ohio State professors earn ASEE diversity award

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Professors La’Tonia Stiner-Jones and Wolfgang Windl have received the 2019 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Best Diversity Paper Award. The paper, “Work in Progress: Aligning What We Want with What We Seek: Increasing Comprehensive Review in the Graduate Admissions Process,” also earned the Graduate Studies Division Best Paper Award during the ASEE Annual Conference in June.

Stiner-Jones and Windl documented their ongoing efforts to improve the identification of students likely to complete a graduate degree. Namely, they changed the application and review process to include an assessment of applicants’ non-cognitive variables based on Sedlacek’s work and the Fisk-Vanderbilt MS-PhD Bridge Program admissions model. Full paper can be accessed here.

photo of Wolfgang Windl

For decades, graduate programs have evaluated students for admission based in considerable part on the standardized graduate record examination (GRE) and grade point average (GPA). These metrics however, have limited correlation to success in graduate school.

The Department of Materials Science and Engineering piloted the new approach, changing their admission criteria in 2016. Between 2016 and 2018, the number of women and underrepresented minorities increased in the department by 19 percent and 57 percent, respectively.

A paper written by Professors Tanya Nocera, Alexis Ortiz-Rosario and David Delaine, and Graduate Teaching Associate Amena Shermadou also qualified as a finalist for the 2019 Best Diversity Paper award.

Categories: AwardsFaculty