Assessment

Assessment distinguishes what the team builds from what each student can take engineering responsibility for. Delegating work to an agent does not delegate responsibility: students must be able to explain the system, justify consequential decisions, and reason about and control its behavior.

Assessment	What it establishes	How
Project Assessment	The team can produce a working system that satisfies its specification.	Teams working from the same regulation converge on a shared specification, implement independently, and cross-test one another's systems.
Oral Exams	Each student can exercise engineering responsibility for the system they helped build.	Two individual oral exams require students to explain the system, justify engineering decisions, reason about its behavior and limitations, and evaluate and control changes to it.
Formative Assessment	Students and course staff can identify developing strengths and gaps while there is still time to act on them.	After each project phase, students reflect on their engineering competencies and provide feedback about their experience in the course.

Project assessment and oral exams provide complementary evidence. The artifact shows what the team accomplished; the oral exam establishes what the individual engineer can stand behind. Cross-testing also provides a feedback loop, surfacing specification gaps and conformance failures rather than merely assigning a score.

Formative assessment serves a different role. It makes the course's engineering competencies visible to students throughout the semester and gives course staff timely evidence about what is working, what is not, and where students need additional support.