GRADING ENGINEERING DESIGN PROJECTS – LET PRODUCTS GIVE FEEDBACK!

DS 83: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education (E&PDE16), Design Education: Collaboration and Cross-Disciplinarity, Aalborg, Denmark, 8th-9th September 2016

Year: 2016
Editor: Erik Bohemia, Ahmed Kovacevic, Lyndon Buck, Christian Tollestrup, Kaare Eriksen, Nis Ovesen
Author: Voß, Markus; Bozkurt, Hulusi; Sauer, Thorsten
Series: E&PDE
Institution: DHBW Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University, Germany
Section: Assessment
Page(s): 442-447
ISBN: 978-1-904670-62-9

Abstract

The article reflects the current practice of grading Engineering Design projects and suggests ways for
enabling students to get ‘direct feedback’ from products. In the current practice, educators often
establish a goal system where the assessment criteria are modulated by weighting factors. The
inherent problem with this assessment procedure is that quality of the feedback obviously depends on
the experience that the educator has obtained in these domains. Figuratively speaking, the educator is
the mirror through which the students perceive their learning achievement – with all risks for eventual
‘dark spots’ on the mirror! In many design assignments, engineering students do a lot of paperwork.
But on very rare occasions during their studies, they should also build and test the appliances, products
or machines they have planned. The interest of the paper lies in the direct feedback that students
receive when they ‘design-build-test’ products: When students also test the products they have
designed, it is the product and not the teacher that tells the students if (or how well) the product works.
This also allows to develop easily measurable criteria that assess product performance and to integrate
them into a grading scheme. The authors illustrate this assessment paradigm by various examples
from teaching an Engineering Design course in a BEng programme.

Keywords: Project-oriented and problem-based learning, grading, learning achievement, feedback.

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