Student responses to activities designed to develop generic professional skills

This paper reports on student responses to a range of assessment activities in a final-year engineering unit. Existing assessment activities were supp lemented with new activities, the overall aim being to link the assessment activities more effectively to the material being studied, and to develop a range of generic skills important in professional engineering practice. A class survey was undertaken at the beginning of the semester is establish t he initial attitudes to the new assessment activities. This was followed up with an end-of-semester survey to determine the change in perceived value of the assessment activities, and to collect student feedback regarding the activities. The perceived Value of the assessment activities was determine d using a Likert rating scale, while student feedback was collected using o pen-ended questions. The assessment activities evaluated were group work, c ase study investigation, report writing, oral presentation, group self-asse ssment, industrial interviews, and written reflective journals. The respons es indicate that engineering students value a range of assessment activitie s. They value highly visits to real engineering organizations, and-contrary to popular belief -value and enjoy oral presentation exercises.