Bologna vs non-Bologna academic outcome in BEng Mechanical Engineering within EHEA

The arising of European Higher Education Area (EHEA) brought up the implementation of new degrees throughout most of European Universities. In the realm of this upcoming environment, during 2009-2010 the School of Design Engineering (ETSID) at Universitat Politècnica de València in Spain, developed a pioneer experience in the first year of the Bachelor Engineering (BEng) degree in Mechanical Engineering, the guidelines of this innovative experience being defined in accordance with the EHEA approaches. Thus, this pioneer experience co-existed with non-Bologna teaching-learning methodology followed in the rest of groups of this BEng degree. Positive academic outcomes found in this first pioneer group encouraged to extend this experience to the second year of this degree during 2010-2011, in order to ease the upcoming full Bologna implementation. In this line, classroom activities were established so that collaborative work was promoted, autonomous tasks were developed and an assessment that took into account both classroom and autonomous activities was implemented. In this paper, we present a statistical analysis of the achieved academic outcomes of the pioneer group in the second year of the BEng degree in Mechanical Engineering, relating them to the rest of non-pioneer groups of the same year and degree.