Improving education quality, a full scale study

Abstract

We now and then make changes to our courses and how we teach or examine them. This is often done in isolation from other courses that the students take. In this paper we report on experiences made in a coordinated study concerning examination methods. The target group was 60 students from the Systems branch of the Engineering Physics study program. We changed all three courses they took during the first ten weeks of the spring semester 1996. The changes were in short: replace the final exam by weekly assignments, introduce seminars as a method of examination, and in the cases where a written exam was kept, the main focus of the questions were changed to showing understanding, ability to analyze and synthesize.Our experiences in this study clearly show that changing examination is a tool for changing the way our students work, and thus for improving the quality of the education.