Program Outcomes Measurement and Assessment Processes

Abstract

The current engineering program accreditation criteria requires an effective program outcome (PO) assessment procedure along with well documented results, a complete description of the evaluation process that involves extensive participation of the faculty members. To achieve all these, an effective method to estimate students’ performance as well as the effectiveness of the program outcomes (PO) is required. As such, the direct assessment method has been identified and deemed suitable to directly assessed specific students’ knowledge during examination or through skills observation. Specifically, this work reports the effort made by the Department of Electrical, Electronics and System, (EESE), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) to implement the direct assessment method to measure the PO achievement of its students. This is in line with the EESE Dept.’s continuous quality improvement (CQI) practice to improve its PO assessment method before the next visit by the Accreditation Council in 2011. To do so, the assessment results from each semester of the academic sessions 2008/2009 and 2009/2010 are analysed to produce the annual PO. Measurement of PO achievement is carried out on selected sampled courses. In selecting the courses for the assessment, at least two courses from each academic year that are offered in the two different semesters are selected. Since the academic program is a 4 year program, 8 courses need to be selected for the purpose. Accordingly, this paper is written to describe the assessment method used to measure the PO via direct assessment of the course outcomes (Cos) as an improvement to previous practice where the COs were assessed indirectly using survey and examination results. The direct assessment results showed that the average PO attainment for both academic session 2008/2009 and 2009/2010 are greater than 3.0 and fulfils the benchmark value set by the department. Nevertheless, the Dept. is still putting up an effort to improve the assessment method in order to find the best method to directly assess both COs and POs simultaneously.