Do engineering students fail because they don´t know how to fail?

Freshmen engineering retention rates are low in universities across the country even though recruiting efforts target the highest quality high school students. This study addresses the effect helping students cope with academic failure and if this can be used to increase student retention. This paper discusses an approach by the University of Pittsburgh´s Freshman Engineering Program in order to address the emotional issues that the freshmen students endure due to their academic failure. It was determined through this research that the freshmen engineering students must adjust their unrealistic, preconceived academic expectations transferred from high school, as well as accept academic failure and learn to react in a positive manner to their classroom performance. We have found our students do not know how to deal with failure.