2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Every engineering education program aims to prepare its students to successfully perform in the professional field. In the case of the United States, the incorporation of capstone courses is promoted to integrate learning at the time of graduation, a practice that has influenced the Latin American context. However, unlike in the U.S., many of these courses offered at Latin American institutions lead to obtaining a professional degree. This makes it even more critical; not only to integrate all the learning opportunities experienced throughout the program, but also to certify the attainment of the expected outcomes.
This article presents the experience of redesigning a project evaluation course at a Latin American university. Until the first semester of 2024, this course functioned as a capstone course for the program about Industrial and Systems engineering. It was offered each semester in 8 sections, serving approximately 900 students per year. Each section had a professor and an industry counterpart who proposed projects for the students to evaluate financially by working in teams. Each team worked directly with a representative from the industry counterpart, besides relying on the guidance of a program alumnus with experience in the field.
In the second semester of 2024, this course transitioned into a certifying course that grants a professional degree. The research objective of this study is to analyze the impact of redesigning this course in terms of learning outcome attainment. Using factorial models, this study aims to evaluate students’ ability to conduct financial and cost analyses applied to the requirements of private and public institutions; and to model solutions in complex and open systems of industrial engineering, adhering to technical, social, and ethical constraints. Learning outcome attainment was based on a case study evaluation undertaken by a sample of 142 students. This sample represents 60% of the students enrolled in the course during the first semester of 2024, a preliminary version that had already incorporated curriculum changes to be considered in the degree-granting course.
Based on the results presented, the article discusses the implications of transforming a course into a milestone to confer an engineering degree, focusing on continuous improvement based on learning outcome assessment and evaluation. It highlights the need for systematic and rigorous evaluation of the outcome attainment in this final stage of engineering training.