Comparative study on the effect of talent cultivation between experimental class and regular class of environmental engineering major in a key University of China

Based on the training demand for high-quality top talents, a key university in China has established “Jingchu Excellent Talents Program”. In order to explore the effect of this model on talent cultivation, this study took students majoring in Environmental Engineering as the research object, continuously tracked their academic performance and graduation destination, and studied the cultivation effect of experimental class by comparing with regular class. The study found that the academic performance of the first year was the most critical to determine whether students could achieve admissions to postgraduate qualifications, and also the key factor affecting the subsequent decision of students to take the postgraduate entrance examination or employment. The overall score of the experimental class was higher than that of the regular class, and the employment situation of the experimental class was far better than that of the regular class. There was a positive correlation between students’ learning ability and their college entrance examination scores. Considering factors such as curriculum design, differences in student sources, and learning environments, this paper proposed suggestions such as optimizing the selection mechanism for experimental classes, and the research results provided references for the talent cultivation model of top-notch students in colleges and universities.