Poster Session for External Reviews of Capstone Projects

The capstone project course at the University of Evansville is a two-semester sequence in which students complete a project design in the first term and an implementation to verify the design in the second term. At the end of the second term all students present their projects. The presentations include an oral and a written report plus a poster presentation. In the past, all of these were graded and assessed separately. Working engineers from the local community were used to judge the oral reports while faculty assessed the report and poster presentation. However, analysis showed a disparity between the scores that the working engineers gave the projects based on the oral reports and the scores that faculty gave the same project based on more extensive data. To address this issue, the working engineers now judge the poster presentations instead of the oral reports with faculty judging the oral presentations and papers. Each student or team is required to present a professional quality poster about their project to each of the working engineering judges. We typically have four judges and each judge spends about 20 minutes with each student project. This gives the judges time for more in-depth questions and a better opportunity to understand the design and implementation of the project. In the spring of 2013 we refined the rubric which the judges used and tied it to ABET outcomes for the program. In this paper we present the course details, an assessment based on ABET outcomes, and feedback on results from students and the professional engineering community.