Resumen de Holistic assessment of student performance in multidisciplinary engineering capstone design projects
Mark Steiner, Junichi Kanai, Cheng Hsu, Richard Alben, Lester Gerhardt
Capstone design courses are commonly employed in engineering schools to culminate students’ learning experiences, as called forby the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). Although widely considered one of the best practices ofengineering education, these courses continue to challenge the field. Capstone courses are challenging not only because they involveopen-ended design that may require researching untried approaches while at the same time being accountable to sponsors’ particular requirements; but also due to their multidisciplinary nature and the dynamics of student teams. These challenges arereflected in the problem of giving each project the relevant advising and each student a fair final grade. In this paper we present aholistic approach to advising and evaluation of individual students in multidisciplinary teams that was developed and has proven towork at Rensselaer. The approach adopted a two-person, often multidisciplinary, instructing team design, coupled with ‘mentors’from sponsoring companies, to coach the students; and developed dedicated rubrics to measure student performance concerningadherence to design process, team participation, and communication skills. These new rubrics added to the traditional methods,which include group reports and student peer evaluations. The new team teaching design also separated the duties associated withcoaching and judging, to make advising and evaluation more effective and objective. Our internal reviews and students’ peerevaluations showed that a high degree of consistency in grading has been achieved with the implementation of the new design.Finally, we submit that the basic structure of the holistic approach—i.e., blending objectives with due process and evaluation frommultiple sources, is consistent with practices in industry that students will face after graduation.
