Evaluation of the second group of program/Criterion 3 outcomes

This page is outdated. Please refer instead to this page that discusses all three groups of outcomes. Background: For convenience, we have classified our program outcomes which are essentially identical to the EAC Criterion 3 outcomes, into three groups. The first group consists of outcomes dealing with technical skills; the second group consists of outcomes dealing with "soft skills"; the third group consists of the two outcomes dealing with societal issues. This page concerns our approach to evaluating the outcomes in the second group.

Outcomes in the group: The outcomes in the second group are:

  1. an ability to function on multi-disciplinary teams;
  2. an ability to communicate effectively with a range of audiences;
  3. a recognition of the need for, and an ability to engage in life-long learning and continuing professional development;

Assessment of outcomes:
(**Need to rewrite or remove CAPST/index.html; it is very old!**)
Each of the capstone courses (each BS-CSE student is required to take at least one of these) requires students to work on a suitable team project; to make one or more oral presentations; and to learn about, on their own, new tools and techniques and write a suitable paper on the topic. We have developed suitable rubrics for assessing each of these activities:

Every capstone course instructor uses these rubrics to assess the students' degree of achievement of the corresponding outcomes. The fact that all capstone design courses uses a common set of rubrics and the fact that students take their capstone courses near the end of their programs together ensure that we have a uniform way of assessing these outcomes at the program level. However, until recently, the evaluation of the assessment results and identifying possible ideas for improvements has been done by the individual instructors of these courses. While this works, in order to make it possible for faculty to share these ideas and to strengthen the program-level assessment of these outcomes, we have recently instituted a suitable mechanism for discussing the assessment results in the Undergraduate Studies Committee and recording the evaluation results, including ideas for improvements, so that they are easily accessible to all capstone course instructors and all interested faculty.

The results are reported to the Undergraduate Studies Committee (UGSC); and are discussed by UGSC on a regular basis.

CSE 601 is another course that helps develop students' communication skills. The second rubric above is used in that course to evaluate students' oral presentations. Since the writing activity in that course is of a different nature from the one in the capstone courses, with the focus being on societal, ethical and professional issues rather than lifelong learning, a different rubric is used to evaluate that activity.

Resources

  1. Effective oral presentations (also google, "effective oral presentations").
  2. Effective team work (also google, "effective team work").
  3. The group presentation. (Also google, "effective team presentations").
    (see also: Team presentation; a book chapter on team presentations.)
  4. An interesting "project rubric".