An assessment model for large project courses

Abstract

Larger project courses, such as capstone projects, are essential in a modern computing curriculum. Assessing such projects is, however, extremely challenging. There are various aspects and tradeoffs of assessments that can affect the quality of a project course. Individual assessments can give fair grading of individuals, but may loose focus of the project as a group activity. Extensive teacher involvement is necessary for objective assessment, but may affect the way students are working. Continuous feedback to students can enhance learning, but may be hard to combine with fair assessment. Most previous work is focusing on some specific assessment aspect, whereas we in this paper present an assessment model that consists of a collection of assessment activities, each covering different aspects. We have applied, developed, and improved these activities during a six-year period and evaluated their usefulness by performing a questionnaire-based survey.

Assessment and Plagiarism

“…In a substantial review of the assessment of computing at school and tertiary levels, the Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE) working group of Giordano et al (2015) lists the following best practices: de-emphasize syntax; formulate assessments independent from specific programming language by resorting to pseudocodes that avoid any form of ambiguity (Cutts et al, 2014); make use of grading rubrics to make the assessments of projects less subjective and more transparent to students (Vasilevskaya, Broman, & Sandahl, 2014); resort to gamification and competitions to render assessment more engaging (Gouws, Bradshaw, & Wentworth, 2013;hakulinen, Auvinen, & Korhonen, 2015).…”

A Novel Design of Management Senior Project for Engineering Students

“…Lejk and Wyvill [9] identified 6 different approaches to the allocation of marks to group work that consider: individual versus group marks, student contribution to assessment distribution, weighing factors for individuals and separating individual and group assessed items. In [10], the authors stated that it is very hard to find a single assessment activity that balances between individual and group assessment, involves both teachers and students, and is summative as well as formative.…”