Graduation rates in undergraduate programs are presented by cohort of students, college,
gender, and nationality (national vs international).
The graduation rate (GR) is the percentage of students in a cohort of students who
completed their degree within 1.5 times the nominal length of their degree program,
i.e.,
Nominal length of an undergraduate degree program:
The nominal length of an undergraduate degree program, in semesters, is the total
credit hours of the degree program divided by 15, e.g., the nominal length of engineering
undergraduate programs is 147/15 = 9.8 10 semesters or 5 years.
For the sake of simplicity, the nominal lengths of degree programs are rounded to
be 4, 5 or 6 years and the corresponding 1.5 times the nominal lengths are taken to
6, 7 or 8. The Bachelor of Medicine is a 6 years program and we exceptionally take
its 1.5 times nominal length to be 8 years instead of 9 years to reduce the overall
duration for graduation.
Cohort of undergraduate students
A cohort of undergraduate students is composed of all undergraduate students who either
completed or met at admission the Foundation English requirements and started taking
college courses in a specific academic year.
Once the Foundation program is canceled, i.e., for the 2020-21 cohort and onward,
an undergraduate cohort will consist of all undergraduate students who were unconditionally
admitted to the University at a specific year. For example, the 2020-21 undergraduate
cohort will consist of all the undergraduate students admitted to UAEU in Fall 2020
or Spring 2021.
Exclusions from a cohort
Students whose registration status is "Admission cancelation", "Application cancelation",
"Admissions deferments" or "Registration Postponement" at the admission year are not
considered as part of a cohort.
Inclusion of postponed registration
In the computation of graduation rates, the registration status of a student is determined at 1.5 times the nominal length of his/her degree program, irrespective of whether he/she postponed his/her registration for one or two semesters during this period. The period for determining the graduation status of a student was increased from one to 1.5 times the nominal length of the program for the purpose of accommodating registration postpones or any other reasonable delays in the student s studies. Note that UAEU policies allow for a maximum of two semesters of postponed registration during a student s period of study.
A college cohort of students When computing the graduation rate in a specific college,
the cohort of students considered in the calculation are the students in the corresponding
university cohort whose last college on record is the considered college. For example,
in computing the undergraduate graduation rate for the 2012-13 cohort in the College
of Engineering (COE), we will only consider students from the 2012-13 cohort of undergraduate
students whose last college on record at or before 2018-19 is COE, irrespective of
whether they left the University earlier or are still enrolled at the University.
