Implementation Of Assessment Procedures Into The Mechanical Engineering Curriculum

The Department of Mechanical Engineering Stevens Institute of Technology (SIT) is aiming at devising a modern engineering program that reflects the recent nationwide trend towards enhancement of traditional lecture-based courses with a design spine and a laboratory experience that propagates through the entire educational program. Another thread to be woven into the whole educational experience is the fostering of independent entrepreneurship through Technogenesis, a cornerstone of the institute’s strategic plan. Technogenesis is the educational frontier at SIT wherein faculty, students, and colleagues from industry jointly nurture the process of conception, design, and marketplace realization of technology. The scope and complexity of the planned curriculum developments to address the above require careful planning of assessment procedures to ensure the educational integrity of the resulting program. Therefore, the School of Engineering (SoE) formed an assessment committee and charged it with the implementation of outcomes-based assessment by quantitative measurements of performance and attitudes throughout a hierarchical matrix of curricular goals, objectives, and performance criteria. A Microsoft Windows application termed the Stevens Educational Assessment Application (SeaApp) was developed to automate the assessment system. This application was designed for the usage by instructors and graders. It assists them in relating the course objectives to the curriculum objectives and in monitoring the performance of students according to curriculum performance criteria. This paper outlines the multi-layered assessment structure of curriculum performance criteria and assessment performance criteria of the Stevens assessment process and discusses the application of these general assessment procedures to the design of the mechanical engineering curriculum in general and one specific junior course in mechanical engineering ME 358 Machine Dynamics and Mechanisms in particular.