Quality Tools in Engineering Education

1 Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. Trindade CP 476. 88040-970 Florianópolis SC – Brasil. [email protected] Abstract Maybe due to the success of their use in industrial companies, quality programs have been often applied in Engineering courses. These programs aim at applying basic concepts of Total Quality Management to the structure of teaching activities and to the way they are functioning. The main purpose of these programs is to select practical actions for educational process improvement. This paper tries to develop a critical analysis of these experiences, considering mainly the report of personnel involved in the subject. The quality models of some Brazilian universities (used mainly during the years 1999 and 2000) are considered. Production and industrial engineering, Mechanical engineering, Civil engineering and Electrical engineering were the main courses we have analyzed. The evaluation applied to the quality programs tries to emphasize situations where the results obtained are not the desired ones. These cases have had some failures during the application of the program. We have carried out the analysis of causes, circumstances, situations or accidental aspects that have contributed for critical problems and we propose some actions to avoid them.