2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Learning outcomes of engineering courses typically involve students being able to understand and apply concepts, rather than just memorize or reproduce information. To evaluate whether these learning outcomes have been met, authentic summative assessments focus on students applying the concepts that they have learned. This means that these assessments often involve students working through problems. For example, in the lower division electrical engineering course used to validate this study, the final exam takes 3 hours and normally consists of 5 to 6 such constructed-response problems.

Generally, these problem-based summative assessments involve a holistic grading approach, based on the fully worked solution. They are not well-suited for a format where grades would be based on the final answer only, as this limits the opportunity to award partial credit. Questions often require students to successfully apply multiple concepts embedded in the same problem. Instead of considering the final answer only, the students’ problem -solving strategy itself is considered in detail, by evaluating the steps they follow to arrive at the answer. In the literature, this type of exam that assigns grades based a student’s worked response is referred to as “constructed-response” (CR). Grading rubrics are used to capture the richness of the problem-solving approach, to arrive at a more authentic assessment.

The challenge is that this approach requires significant grading effort and time. The goal of our study is to investigate a design strategy for summative assessments that significantly cuts down on grading time, while keeping the assessment authentic. A reduction in grading time would free up resources that could be redeployed in other parts of the course, such as to provide more tutoring support. In this paper, we propose a design methodology to create such time-efficient authentic summative assessments for engineering courses. Our proposed design strategy consists of two steps: (1) systematically create a problem that consists of targeted sub-questions and (2) grade these based on a rubric applied to the final answers only.

We will validate the representative nature of this summative assessment methodology by implementing it for a large undergraduate electrical engineering course with an enrollment of 275+ students. By using a comparison group, we will evaluate how close the new approach comes to capturing the richness of the original problem-based assessment. In our experiment, student loss of partial credit was less than 5% on average, while the time effort required for grading was reduced 8-fold.