Offering modern and engaging senior design projects is a challenging and time consuming task for chemical plant design instructors. Further, an offering of a chemical plant design project course may not include projects that align with student interests within the cohort. At the University of California Davis, a course in Process Design and Economics is a required senior-level course prior to the Plant Design Project course. In addition to the challenge of offering modern and engaging design projects, assessing students' ability to achieve the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) student outcomes in these design courses using standard quiz and exam-type assessments can be difficult. In an effort to improve the assessment of ABET student outcomes in the Process Design and Economics course, as well as to offer modern and engaging senior design projects, students were tasked with proposing their own senior design project idea in the Process Design and Economics course for potential use in the Plant Design Project course. This design project proposal assignment required students to describe a potential design project idea and assess its potential merits using input/output (I/O) economics, safety, and societal assessments. The best proposals were considered for implementation as senior design projects in the Plant Design Project course.After the completion of the assignment, students were voluntarily surveyed to gauge their perception of the effectiveness of the assignment as a measurement of their ability to develop a preliminary design idea. They were also surveyed to measure their perception of how strongly the ABET outcomes for the course mapped to this assignment. Student performance on the assignment was assessed on the basis of the students ability to 1) communicate in writing effectively, 2) design a preliminary process to meet a societal need within realistic constraints, 3) understand ethical responsibilities and potential safety issues, 4) understand the impact of the proposed design project in a global, environmental, and societal context, 5) gain a knowledge of contemporary issues, as well as 6) gain an ability to engage in life-long learning by immersing themselves in the literature. The survey results indicated that a majority of the students felt they achieved the ABET outcomes targeted by this assessment and gained an appreciation for how a plant design project idea is developed. Further, specific outcomes of this assessment appear to be especially beneficial to both female and under-represented minority (URM) students. Three new senior design projects have been adopted for the Plant Design Project course, initiated by the student ideas proposed though this assignment.

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For a variety of reasons, universities are seeking ways to put course evaluations online. We describe a pilot program implemented in the College for Computer Sciences, Mathematics and Physical Sciences at the University of Maryland. We will describe the process that began with a committee articulating needs, tailoring the use of WebCT as the overall environment, creating specialized tools for supporting students and faculty, and downloading the data for statistical processing. The paper discusses the issues the project faced, the resolutions to these issues, and new challenges facing this program.

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