Evaluation and assessment of professional skills in the Final Year Project

In this paper, we present a methodology for Final Year Project (FYP) monitoring and assessment that considers the inclusion of the professional skills required in the particular engineering degree. This proper monitoring and clear evaluation framework provides the student with valuable support for the project implementation as well as for improving the quality of the projects, thereby reducing the academic drop-out rate. The proposed methodology has been implemented at the Barcelona School of Informatics at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya - BarcelonaTech. The FYP is structured around three milestones: project definition, project monitoring and project completion. Skills are assigned to each milestone according to the tasks required in that phase, and a list of indicators is defined for each phase. The evaluation criteria for each indicator at each phase are specified in a rubric, and are made public both to students and teachers. Thus, the FYP includes an exhaustive evaluation method distributed throughout the whole project implementation, thereby facilitating project organization for the student as well as providing a clear and homogeneous assessment framework. The methodology for the FYP organization, assessment and evaluation was launched and piloted over two semesters. We believe the experience to be general in the sense that it has been conducted as part of an ICT engineering degree, but may easily be extended to any other engineering degree.Postprint (author’s final draft

Reviewing the curriculum of computer science undergraduate courses to incorporate communication and interpersonal skills teaching

The major problems of software development projects are not so much technical as sociological in nature. The industry seems to agree very much with this statement while the university seems to give it little importance. The article begins analyzing some related work and proposes change in the computer science undergraduate course to accommodate new ways of teaching and to incorporate professional skills teaching. lt also describes a course on extreme programming where some techniques will be used and evaluated

Assessing professional skills in engineering education

This paper addresses the issue of developing and assessing professional skills in higher education programs. This includes defining and assessing these skills, in the contexts of an individual course unit and for an entire degree program. Identifying forms of assessment that are seen as authentic, meaningful and understandable by the students, teaching staff and curriculum developers are of utmost importance if professional skills are to be accepted and included in the formal curriculum. This can be particularly important in programs that aim to offer students a truly collaborative learning experience in a culturally diverse team. Reflections are presented as one example of an assessment method that fits this requirement. Building assessment based on the notion of threshold concepts is introduced in the context of an open ended group project course unit at Uppsala University