Techniques For Assessing Industrial Projects In Engineering Design Courses

The benefits of company sponsored student design projects, both to academia and to industry, have been well established recently in symposia and in publications. However, assessing these benefits in order to improve the students’ experience can be difficult. Traditionally, design reports alone have been the method by which the students’ performance is judged. In this paper, the authors demonstrate the use of company evaluations, oral reports, student self-assessments, as well as design reports to quantify student performance. These methods will be discussed and examples presented showing how the results can be used to improve student performance on industrial projects.