Holistic Assessment Methodology for Undergraduate Projects

Abstract

Higher education in general and professional education in particular, graduates have to acquire required knowledge, specific skills and attitudes. Project work is one of the major components that aims at inculcating most of the required attributes in any undergraduate program. One of the most important activities of the practicing engineer is finding solutions to problems that arise by applying his knowledge and converting physical principles into useful devices/solutions. This involves creativity, imagination and reasonably strong analytical ability. These qualities can be nurtured in a systematic way. Realizing the importance of these aspects, project work plays a major role in achieving the above objective. The quality of the project work depends upon its selection process, size and complexity and support of the faculty-mentor. Some of the reputed institutes such as IITs follow the standard assessment mechanism to evaluate the quality of project work, but there is lot of scope for improvement. This paper discusses various aspects of improving assessment methods of project work and demonstrates an outcome based assessment method to evaluate the quality of project work in alignment with the recent guidelines introduced by National Board of Accreditation (NBA) for undergraduate programs.