Engineering common sense in this study refers to the students' level of knowledge of elementary engineering and their application. This characteristic is considered essential for facilitating students to be able to move on to the more involved topics in engineering. An assessment of common sense has been carried out among newly enrolled students in Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering Programs by using the marks obtained from several questions in a test. The results showed that the students who should have already mastered simple mathematical operations and hence having common sense, a significant proportion of them failed to apply it. Based on answers to three simple questions the assessment showed two extremes of common sense levels with an almost 50: 50 distribution, one at the lowest and the other at the highest. Although the admission grade points for this cohort of students are considered high, it appears that there is a problem with common sense for half of them. Do these students think that once they enter tertiary level engineering studies, learning becomes so formal that there is no room for using common sense? (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd.