Formative Assessment

After each project phase, students complete a short survey with two purposes: remind students what they are learning to do as future engineers, and give course staff timely feedback about what is and is not working.

Engineering competencies

Students assess their confidence in seven competencies:

• Understand requirements — Determine what stakeholders need, why they need it, and what constraints the system must satisfy.
• Specify a system — Represent what the system must do precisely enough to guide implementation and evaluate whether it is correct.
• Architecture — Structure a system into components, assign responsibilities, and define their interactions so that important system properties can be achieved.
• Choose designs — Make and justify component- and implementation-level design decisions that comply with architectural constraints while managing relevant tradeoffs.
• Validate — Gather evidence that the system satisfies its requirements and behaves acceptably in the conditions that matter.
• Modify — Change an existing system while understanding the consequences and preserving the properties that should remain true.
• Exert control of agents — Structure an agent's task and engineering environment so that its work is constrained, checked, and governed by engineering intent.

These are self-assessments, not demonstrations of competence. Individual competence is assessed through the Oral Exams.

Administration

Administer the survey after each project phase, while the experience is still fresh. In the Purdue offering, surveys are distributed on the Tuesday following each phase deadline.

Keep the seven competency questions constant across surveys. Add a small number of phase-specific and course-feedback questions as appropriate.

Reusing the survey

This will be a link to a set of Google Form surveys.

Copy the surveys for your course rather than editing the shared versions. The competency questions form the stable core; phase-specific and course-feedback questions can be adapted.