Outcome Based Performance Evaluation Approach Using Rubric Based Capstone Projects Assessment

In the engineering field, the capstone project allows engineering students to utilize their acquired abilities gained from courses offered in the engineering curriculum to solve a complex engineering problem. The project is considered as a major component for the program assessment and its importance is strongly emphasized by local and international accreditation agencies. The assessment of the capstone project covers almost the whole spectrum of the ABET Engineering Accreditation Commission (EAC) (1-7) students' outcomes and by itself, it is considered enough to be used as a credible assessment tool for evaluating the attainment of the students' outcomes. In this work, we share our experiences in the development of an evaluation framework along with a highly granulated analytic scoring rubric for capstone projects with precise set of evaluation criteria to accurately assess the attributes for each of the capstone project's Course Learning Outcomes (CLOs) dimension. We firmly believe that the learned experience for the academic outcome assessment would greatly aid other academicians, particularly working in engineering field in their assessment of the capstone projects and eventually Program Learning Outcomes (PLOs) in efficient way.