2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

ABSTRACT

Norwich University has successfully been utilizing the Engineering Professional Skills Assessment (EPSA) method in the senior level course EG450 Professional Issues. This course covers a range of topics, such as ethics, licensure, and client interactions, which are related to the professional practice of engineering. Similar senior level courses at other institutions commonly utilize case studies focusing on ethics as the basis for student discussions. Measuring the student learning resulting from the case study process is often very subjective and is difficult to quantify.

The Engineering Professional Skills Assessment (EPSA) method was created as a direct method for eliciting and measuring professional skills, such as ethics, consideration of impacts of decisions, communications skills, and the ability to function on a team, as described in ABET criterion 3 - student outcomes. While EPSA was originally developed to teach and assess the professional skills specified in ABET EC2000 criterion 3, EPSA has been continuously updated as ABET has revised the student outcomes in criterion 3, and EPSA works with the current (2025-2026) ABET criteria. The EPSA method is a discussion-based performance assessment using a 1-2 page scenario about an interdisciplinary contemporary multi-faceted engineering problem, a discussion prompt, consisting of a series of standardized questions about the scenario, and a task-specific analytical rubric, which is used to evaluate the students’ discussions and interactions.

The EPSA method was the subject of a four-year reliability and validity study funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF DUE #: 1432997). After the completion of the study, the team members introduced other faculty members to the EPSA method, who then have independently started to utilize aspects of the EPSA method in their programs. This paper describes how the EPSA scenarios and prompts, student discussions, and the EPSA rubric, have been used since 2012 in the senior level Professional Issues course for engineering and construction management students. The course instructors have found the interdisciplinary EPSA scenarios to generate more enthusiastic and higher level discussion than case studies that focus solely on ethics. For example, in a recent semester one professor elected to use the EPSA “Offshore Wind Farm” scenario due to recent news concerning the offshore wind farms being constructed off the New England coast. This scenario includes economic, political, regulatory, ethical, and environmental considerations, including such issues as public use vs. private rights related to land-use, effects of regulations on utility prices, reliability of renewable energy, global warming, and the international markets for energy. The student discussions may be conducted live in the classroom or virtually using the chat features of course’s learning management system.

The EPSA Rubric provides a standardized means to evaluate the quality of student discussions and makes evaluation of students’ work more consistent between the multiple sections of the course. The flexibility of the EPSA method allows it to be readily adapted for use in other courses.

The paper includes presentation of several of the EPSA scenarios, the standardized questions which are used to prompt the student discussion, the EPSA rubric, and will address how these have been incorporated for use at both the classroom and program level.