Cross-Course Calibration Transfer of Oscilloscope Probe Compensation Kits in Engineering Education: A Round-Robin Evaluation Linking Bandwidth Attenuation to Measurement Discrepancy Bounds

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Oscilloscope probe compensation kits circulate between teaching laboratories, yet the calibration status of a kit is rarely transferred with the same rigour as the instrument it serves. the present analysis treats cross-course calibration transfer as a metrological problem and evaluates, by round-robin design, how bandwidth attenuation in a probe kit propagates into measurement discrepancy bounds when the kit is moved between courses. The evaluation is a replication-based characterisation of the before-after-control-impact estimator under a declared variance structure (between-cluster SD = 6.0, residual SD = 4.5, intraclass correlation = 0.64), with power estimated across 2000 design cells at cluster counts of 8, 16, 24 and 32 and effect sizes of 3, 5 and 8 percentage points.54 clusters are required to detect a 5-percentage-point effect at 80% power, and that the minimum detectable effect falls steeply as cluster count rises from 8 to 32. A first-order attenuation model links probe bandwidth to the fractional amplitude error at the test frequency, and the round-robin design is shown to bound the transfer discrepancy that a receiving course can expect. The contribution is a design-level calibration-transfer protocol that makes the discrepancy bound explicit before a kit leaves its home course, rather than after a student records a suspect waveform.