Assessment of Course Outcomes Attainment using Confidence Limits

Abstract

Course Outcomes (CO) assessment is one of the most important components of Outcome Based Education (OBE) to describe the specific type and level of learning students. The programs must have an effective end results in every course and their systematic assessment with proper documentation and should evaluate continuously to establish certain standards leading to program accreditation. In the calculation of CO attainment, the mean values are usually considered as a target values but it may create ambiguity in decision making. The target value in conventional method is unbounded on the upper and lower ends, which undermines interpretations of student's category associated with their performance. In this paper an attempt has been made with a new approach for calculation of CO attainments based on Lower Confidence Limit (LCL) and Upper Confidence Limit (UCL) and compared against conventional method. This comparison has shown that the proposed method showed a nontrivial improvement over existing conventional method and found more flexible, relatively well behaved, and applicable to a wide range of students' categories. Further, proposed method has the advantage of being useful in framing appropriate syllabi of courses and in making effective strategy to improve students' performance. Keywords: Outcome Based Education, Lower Confidence Limit, Upper Confidence Limit, Attainment of Course Outcome