Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica


The Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica is an institution of higher education maintained by the Brazilian Air Force and is located in São José dos Campos, Brazil. ITA is consistently ranked as one of the top engineering schools in Brazil and engages in advanced research in aerospace science and technology.
ITA is one of five institutes that encompass the Brazilian General Command for Aerospace Technology, having its facilities, along with its laboratories and R&D centers, inside the campus of CTA. ITA is a military institution but it does have civilian teachers, directors, and students.
ITA offers regular 5-year engineering undergraduate courses and graduate programs including masters and doctoral degrees.

History

Montenegro hired renowned foreign professors and experts from various parts of the world to teach at ITA, the majority of them from MIT, influenced by Prof. Smith. At a given time of its history, ITA had teachers from more than 20 different nationalities in its faculty, an impressive number, considering it had a faculty of little more than 100 teachers. Nowadays the overwhelming majority of the teachers are Brazilians, many of whom have graduated from ITA themselves.

Undergraduate Courses

All ITA undergraduate students must complete two years of fundamental courses before entering the professional course they intend to take. The six steams of professional courses available to students for study include:
ITA offers masters and doctoral programs through five general streams, with 20 areas of concentration between them, including:
All undergraduate students are granted full scholarships. Complete residential facilities are offered to the students during the entire five-year period at a minimal cost. ITA students are provided with free food, with four daily meals  in which the student can serve himself at will.

Military Career

During their first year at ITA, all students are considered to be military personnel and are required to attend a military preparation course once a week and receive monthly cost-of-living allowances for it during this period. For male students, this fulfills their obligatory military service, which all male citizens in Brazil are required to attend.
Due to ITA's position as an institute maintained by the Brazilian Air Force, undergraduate students may choose to join the military upon graduation as engineering officers or keep their status as civilians members of the reserve. After the first year, students not opting for a military career return to being civilians and stop receiving their pay.
Approximately 20% of admitted undergraduate students choose a military career during their second year and be paid as Student of the Reserve Officers Training Body. These students will continue the military preparation course once every two weeks. They will begin wearing uniforms during their 3rd year at ITA until graduation. Upon graduation, they are promoted to the rank of 1st Lieutenant Engineer and must serve for 5 years.

Economic Impact

The institution was created in 1950, being responsible and contributing in a great extent for the research and development of the aerospace and defense sectors in Brazil, including the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research - INPE, Embraer and Avibrás.
The school's admission exams for its undergraduate courses are considered to be the most competitive in the country and take place annually in over 25 cities throughout Brazil. Students are selected exclusively on their grades in the vestibular. ITA accepts 110 undergraduate students per year and students are distributed into the 5 available Engineering courses according to availability and preference indicated at the time of applying.
ITA's vestibular is composed of two phases. The first phase includes general tests in each of Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Portuguese and English. At this stage, the English exam is eliminatory and requires the candidate to achieve a minimum set score to be qualified. The second phase includes exams in Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and an Essay. All four tests have equal weight. At this stage, all exams are eliminatory and competitive and the applicants with the highest average grades will be selected.
The subjects of ITA's vestibular cover in much greater depth and difficulty than entrance exams of other universities in Brazil, including all the top universities such as UNESP, UNICAMP, UFMG, USP, UFRJ, UFRGS. For this reason, student must prepare specifically for ITA's entrance exam to review information that would not be beyond the scope of the vestibular of other universities and institutes. This usually demands an extra year of study and intense preparation, with students often taking the test multiple times before being selected.
The Instituto Militar de Engenharia, an Engineering institute maintained by the Brazilian Army, have entrance exams of similar difficulty level to ITA, an institution maintained by the Brazilian Air Force. IME, however, attracts a smaller number of candidates each year. Candidates would usually prepare for both ITA and IME exams and the majority of candidates selected by ITA would be selected by IME as well.

Course Evaluation Results

From 1996 to 2003, the Brazilian government conducted yearly evaluation exams for every undergraduate course in Brazil. Written exams, specific to every different type of college course, were given to every student at the time of their graduation and the results were used to evaluate the quality of the college courses and schools in Brazil. These exams were called Provão.
Based on the average grade obtained by the students' course, every school was given a grade from 'A' to 'E' for each of its courses, with 'A' being the best. ITA was the only institution in Brazil to have obtained only 'A's in all the years of Provão, for all of its courses. The Provão results are somewhat misleading, though, as the grades are given by ordering the average grades of the schools in a list and giving the label 'A' to a certain predefined number of schools, and so on. Therefore, two schools that were given the grade 'A' can have substantially different scores, and that is usually the case. The actual grades for each school were not announced by the government, but a list with the highest average grades in 2003 "leaked" and was published by the national magazine Veja.
The published list showed that the courses of Electronic and Computer Engineering at ITA, which both took the exam of Electrical Engineering, attained the highest average grade of the whole Provão in 2003. Its students had an average grade of 79.6 of a total of 100. This average was about 5 point higher than IME's, the 2nd position for Electrical Engineering, with 75.2, about 14 points higher than the 3rd position, UFRGS, with 66.3, and about 17 point higher than renowned USP and UNICAMP with 62.7 and 62.2, respectively. It was about 24 points higher than the 10th position for this course. That is a relative difference of more than 40%. All ten schools published in the list attained an 'A' grade at Provão.
It is now known that in almost every year of Provão up to 2003 ITA's courses figured in either first or second place in its categories, usually competing with IME, both within considerable distance from the remaining schools. It is hard, though, to point references for such information, as it usually comes from unofficial sources or scattered news from journalists that had access to leaked information. , the government institute which conducts these evaluations, publishes the results of all Provões at its , but only shows the alphabetic grade and percentiles in which the students from the institution are. In 2003 94,3% of ITA's Electronic and Computer Engineering students were between the 25% top grades of the exam.
In the first edition of ENADE for Engineering in 2005, successor of Provão, which is only held about every 3 years, ITA's Computer Engineering course once again achieved the highest grade of its category. For the ENADE the government is publishing the actual average grade of each school at INEP's website. In 2008, ITA's Electronics Engineering courses scored the highest evaluation grade among all university courses from the areas evaluated in 2008, which included all engineering areas, computer science, math, architecture, among others. The course evaluation grade of ITA's Electronics Engineering was 485, out of a maximum of 500, based on the test results of the students graduated in 2008.

Notable Professors

In alphabetical order: