Curricular Regimes in Civil Engineering: An Agent-Based Contrast Between Incremental Repair and Disruptive Redesign

This paper examines whether a disruptive curriculum architecture, previously identified as structurally superior, also generates a distinct behavioural regime when compared with the best available incremental repair of the inherited curriculum. Using an agent-based model calibrated on heterogeneous student populations in Civil Engineering, the study contrasts two final curricular regimes under a common behavioural environment: a baseline-optimised repair regime and a disruptive redesign regime derived from prior architectural search. The analysis is organised around two final experiments. The first evaluates global regime differences in completion, dropout, recovery after early failure, time-to-completion, and terminal closure dynamics. The second tests whether the observed contrast remains robust across alternative cohort compositions and shock intensities. The results show that the disruptive regime does not merely improve selected indicators at the margin. It produces a materially superior behavioural configuration, with higher completion, lower dropout, faster completion among graduates, stronger recovery after early failure, and a substantially reduced terminal trap. This advantage persists across fragile-heavy, robust-heavy, polarised, and canonical cohort compositions, and under mild, moderate, and severe stress conditions. However, absolute completion levels remain modest even under the stronger regime. The findings therefore support a bounded conclusion: curriculum architecture is a powerful lever in shaping progression regimes, but it is not sufficient on its own to bring an open-entry, high-demand Civil Engineering programme into a high-completion equilibrium. The paper contributes an agent-based behavioural adjudication of curriculum architecture and clarifies both the power and the limits of curricular redesign under heterogeneous student trajectories.