B029 Project assessment weight

Assessment weighting of final year design project for engineering education

Brief:

To any form of the Design Project Based (DPB) assessment, it should be valid, reliable and socially acceptable in the sense that it must not cause any offence to the student under it and must be trusted and esteemed by those who have to act upon it. As the component of the assessment is an important issue of the subject, the main purpose of this study is to describe the evaluation and development of the assessment criteria and weighting factors by the results of individual components and the overall subject. In particular, weighting factors for four deliverables commonly included in a DPB subject of the Department of Building Services Engineering at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, i.e. verbal progress report, formal project presentation, group written report and individual written report, were determined by maximization of correlation between the marks of the DPB subject and the overall academic performance of the students. The problem of organizing projects for all students was discussed through an attitudinal survey and the assessment results were collected over the past two academic years. It was found that in all sample groups, ‘formal project presentation’ associated with the highest correlation coefficients while ‘verbal progress report’ was with the lowest. With the development of the protocol in subject weighting factors, this study demonstrated a useful example in developing a guideline for assessing students’ work of DPB subjects in engineering.

Further information:

Wong LT, Mui KW, To WTD, 2006. Assessment weighting of final year design project for engineering education, Proceedings of the CIB W89 International Conference on Building Education and Research BEAR 2006-Construction Sustainability and Innovation, Theme 1: Education in the Built Environment, 1.4 Performance in the built environment, International Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction, Kowloon Shangri-La Hotel, 10-13 April, Hong Kong. (2006).