2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Exploring the Journey away from detailed rubrics in capstone projects

Rubric Review Criteria for DEED Papers – 3. Design Methodology Papers

Senior Design capstone programs have a number of learning outcomes, the ability to successfully manage a project is one of these. Students struggle with the transition from small and bounded assignments to a large project with less defined short-term activities and deliverables. With little to no experience in managing large projects the curriculum must provide tools and templates to help the students manage the projects, a common method is to introduce ‘gates’ with specific deliverables for each gate as typically used in industry. The natural response of the students is to convert the gate deliverables into discrete assignments and not see them as tools to help them manage their projects. When this happens, the students focus on the specifics of the assignments and then view their grades as being too subjective and unfair. A vicious cycle is set up where more specific and detailed rubrics are provided by the instructors to help remove the subjectivity and attempt to provide fairer grading, resulting in the students treating the deliverables more and more like an assignment and less like a guide to help them successfully manage their project.

A “Project Health” line item is introduced in the grading rubric as a method to force the students to realize there is more to the deliverable than the specific requirements in the rubric. This change provided a method to reward the project teams who were paying attention to managing their projects in addition to providing the requested specific items in the rubric. The students struggled to understand how they could prepare specific items to contribute to this new rubric line item, in reality there is no way to prepare for this other than to flip from focusing on the assignment to focusing on the project. The impact on their overall grade is small enough that the course was not viewed as excessively disorganized and subjective, but large enough that the students would ask in a constructive way how to improve their score. The results of this change are analyzed and compared to the literature.