A Study on the Analysis of the Quality of Graduate Students Admitted through Adjustment and Strategies for Improvement: A Case Study of the Ocean Engineering Discipline at a Local University in Jiangsu

Abstract

Adjustment is one of the key ways for local applied engineering colleges/universities to achieve the master's enrollment plan and complement the source of students. Structure and overall level of adjustmentadmitted students will also determine the initial quality of graduate training. Based on all applications data of 133 admitted graduate students in the Ocean Engineering discipline of a local university in Jiangsu (from 2024 to 2026) through quantitative statistics and crosscomparison analyses from six aspects such as admission type, firstchoice source, household registration region, preliminary examination scores, undergraduate institution, and major matching degree, it was found that the proportion of adjustment admissions at our college has reached 98.50%, which indicates an extremely short supply of firstchoice applicants; the sources include 87 undergraduate institutions; the applicants coming from crossdisciplines like automation, computer science, and electrical engineering are the absolute majority but only account for 12.78% for those from oceanrelated majors; the student sources are mostly fresh bachelor's graduates from Jiangsu, Shandong, Henan, Anhui and other places; the average preliminary exam score is 292.6 points, and the number of high scorers scoring over 300 accounts for less than 30%; the applicants who failed their first choice 985/211 institutions and underwent reverse adjustment usually got better results than adjustment applicants from ordinary undergraduate institutions. We have proposed optimization plans based on the shortcomings shown by the data including targeted publicity and applicant attraction, tiered adjustment screening, diversified reexamination reform, tiered scholarship and assistantship incentives, and industryeducation integration to build distinctive features so as to provide an empirical reference for the college to optimize its student source structure and stabilize the quality of talent cultivation.