Creation of a New Advising Metric to Develop Viable Individual Senior Projects

Document Type

Article

Department or Administrative Unit

Engineering Technologies, Safety, and Construction

Publication Date

6-2015

Abstract

Determining whether an individual senior project is a ‘good’ project can be a difficult task. To aid the professor in associated advising, but more importantly, the student, a rubric was developed that helps indicate whether a student is proposing an acceptable senior project.

The scope of this effort includes the creation of an assessment tool that measures critical aspects of a good senior project. This includes quantifying the following ‘engineering merit’ aspects: problem statement, function statement, requirements, analyses, performance predictions, and evaluation. These ‘aspects’ exist in all of the capstone projects, regardless of the subject matter or discipline.

Students refer to their proposals when using the metric. Professors review and advise in a timely manner. Students can better determine if they have proposed an ‘acceptable’ senior project before the professor agrees to final acceptance.

The students and professors have applied the rubric to projects in a Mechanical Engineering Technology (MET) senior capstone course. The results showed deficiencies in some projects. This forced changes in the parameters of the project to make it an acceptable project. Assessment of the pedagogical impact of this metric was determined via surveys and comparisons of relevant course data over a number of years.

Comments

This article was originally published in 2015 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition Proceedings. The full-text article from the publisher can be found here.

Journal

2015 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition Proceedings

Rights

© American Society for Engineering Education, 2015

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