Assessment of Student Preparation for Discrete Event Simulation Courses

Over the past years, there has been a growth in simulation courses both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. A discrete event simulation course, as with any non-basic course, has some prerequisites that must be satisfied by students before attending classes. Statistics, computer programming and modeling are the most important, together with knowledge on the specific field being simulated (manufacturing, logistics, etcetera). Are students sufficiently prepared to follow a course on simulation? This work is related to the construction, application and analysis of an assessment instrument to evaluate student prerequisite knowledge for a discrete event simulation course. The proposed questionnaire was given to the 5 year engineering students at the beginning of our first year (72 hours) discrete event simulation introductory course at Mauá School of Engineering. The results obtained show the importance of making an assessment evaluation in order to improve the quality of simulation learning.