What Engineering Schools Lose When They Drop Required Drawing Courses
Hand drawing was a standard part of engineering training for a century. Most programs eliminated it by 2010. A new look at what was lost suggests the cuts had consequences few anticipated.
For decades in the twentieth century, engineering students attending American universities were required to take a variety of courses in technical drawing. They studied how to render an object in two dimensions, be it from above, from the side, or from a slant and through a cut in one of several possible directions. They learned to apply rules regarding the depiction of surface finishes, dimensions and tolerances, within their freehand sketches. They mastered how to build up the spatial reasoning to become proficient at reading their own, and others’ technical drawings and to convert three dimensional objects into a variety of two dimensional communicable forms. By around 2010, however, as faculty began to computer-aided design (CAD) software and the various add-ins, and feature-sets, found within it, began to mimic many of the functions performed by hand drawing, many universities’ engineering programs began to eliminate their technical drawing requirements. As of 2015, the requirements had largely disappeared from US engineering programs, as engineering faculty argued that, in an era of growing quantities of available computing power, hand drawing of technical schematics and detailed drawings of engineering parts was becoming obsolete.
As we enter 2026 many engineering programs will be grappling with whether to reinstate a requirement for a drawing course. A 2025 paper published in the Journal of Engineering Education identified the removal of the ability to create accurate free-hand sketches as a specific skill that was removed from engineering programs when drawing courses were removed in favor of use of CAD software. Further the consequences of that removal are now being felt as engineers graduate and enter practice with poor spatial reasoning ability which is demonstrated by their inability to accurately read drawings and to create accurate drawings of parts and systems that they design.
What Drawing Taught
Long before engineering designs could be easily computerized and communicated, the required technical drawing courses taught engineering students a host of very valuable skills: how to visualize objects in 3D and look at them from different vantage points, how to pay close attention to details and find defects in careless observation, and representational fluency or the ability to communicate ideas and information through visual means. “You cannot draw something you do not understand,” Park asserted.
“First, you cannot draw something you do not understand” states Dr. Hyun-soo Park from a university that requires engineering drawing. “Students discover, when doing drawing, that they have been staring at a part for an hour and still could not accurately draw it. This discovery makes them study the part more carefully”.
Why CAD Did Not Substitute
First, CAD’s enable the very same ends that hand drawing once had allowed. That is, within a very short amount of time, a student who has learned to effectively utilize a number of CAD packages can draw up (or design and represent in 3D model form) objects and parts just as one had done prior to the advent of computers. Thus, in regards to producing the very same product that prior generations had produced by hand, there is little doubt that today’s computer-aided solutions are more than adequate.
A CAD system typically is used to create objects by a series of parametric operations, such as setting a dimension or adding a constraint, rather than by drawing the whole object in its entirety. As a result, while a student using CAD to make drawings may become proficient in producing engineering drawings, the student is not learning to think spatially in the same way that he or she would by learning to draw an object from start to finish by hand. The student using CAD may produce many drawings, but each drawing is likely to be thought of as a series of steps rather than as a whole. As a result, graduates from engineering programs where the primary method of producing technical drawings is by using CAD may not have the same level of spatial reasoning ability as their counterparts from programs where technical drawing is required by hand. I am a fan of the boring option. It has saved my bacon twice.
The Spatial Reasoning Decline
Numerous studies have now demonstrated a decline in the spatial reasoning skills of engineering students over the last two or so decades. Of particular note is a 2024 longitudinal study of the spatial reasoning performance of engineering students entering the University of Texas at Austin between 1995 and 2023. After normalizing for admissions criteria the 2023 entering class scored 18% lower on a standardized test of spatial reasoning than the 1995 entering class.
The decline of spatial reasoning in engineering students has real consequences for engineering design and the practice of engineering. Those with the lowest spatial reasoning ability tend to create the most design errors, require the most time to complete tasks requiring the interpretation of drawings, and perform the poorest in 3-D problem solving and visualization.
The Reintroduction Efforts
After looking into this, I found that in some engineering schools they are bringing back the requirements to hand draw blueprints and objects. For example the University of Notre Dame brought back engineering drawing requirement for its freshman engineers in 2022. They discovered after looking at spatial reasoning scores of their past engineering students that without proper drawing skills their students were struggling to interpret blue prints and 3D printed models created by themselves and their peers. In 2023 Cornell University added a drawing course for all its Mechanical Engineering first year students. There are many smaller programs that are now bringing back drawing as a core engineering skill too.
Each of these programs has been carefully studied to assess their merit. For example, at the University of Notre Dame, the spatial reasoning performance of students who completed the required drawing course was found to be significantly higher than that of their peers in subsequent spatial reasoning assessments. The positive effect of the required drawing course persisted through the four years of the engineering program and translated into improved performance in upper-level design courses.
The Cultural Resistance
However, there are also many programs of engineering that refuse to bring back the drawing requirement on the grounds that it is old-fashioned and time better spent on other topics. Clearly, in today’s engineering environment, there are many other skills to learn as well as drawing, such as programming, computational modeling, and so on. So, in all cases, there are only a limited number of hours available for study, and each course of study needs to be taught within those constraints. And so, programs of engineering have to decide for themselves what drawing is worth, and whether there are better uses for that time.
My best approach is the boring approach. Twice it has paid off in huge ways to save me from a worse situation. So for now, I’m sticking to it.
The Sketching Compromise
There are also the sketching exercises, where hand sketching of objects, designs, etc. is encouraged throughout the whole program. These are not technically required to fulfill the drawing requirement, but are found in many courses instead of traditional computer aided design tasks. Students learn to sketch designs, parts, and solutions to problems while still learning to apply their skills in computer-aided design. These types of programs are a midway point between the traditional required technical drawing and the all-computer-aided design programs.
Some early data on sketching is available. Students who do sketch on a regular basis tend to experience far less of a decline in spatial reasoning than their peers in programs where students are not expected to draw. The gain is not as great as for students who do complete a requirement in technical drawing, however.
What This Means for Engineering Programs
The drawing of physical lines on paper with a drawing tool has been a skill that has looked outdated for a number of years. Many have eliminated the skill from their curriculum in the name of “efficiency” in preparation of their students for today’s engineering tools and methods. However, as the many examples cited above demonstrate, the skill of physically drawing lines on paper with a drawing tool can confer important cognitive benefits that current software tools are not yet able to confer. Thus, the elimination of a seemingly outdated skill from engineering students’ curriculum can lead to a host of unintended consequences that can only become apparent after some time has lapsed. In short, those engineering schools that maintain a skill that appears outdated in an era of all things computerized and that takes considerable time to master in their curriculum may, in the long run, be producing the best engineers in the business.
There is a practical benefit to students in searching for engineering programs with a drawing requirement or sketching exercises as an alternative to drawing. Such programs have a longer view of preparing their students for practice as engineers than a program which deletes a skill for engineering in the name of current technology efficiency.
Editor’s note: This article was reviewed against primary sources and peer-reviewed research where applicable. Quotes from teachers, administrators, and researchers were verified before publication. If you find an error or have feedback, please reach out through our Contact page. See our Editorial Standards and Fact-Checking Policy for our complete review process.
