Individual student assessment in team-based capstone design projects

In our senior design sequence a two-credit writing-intensive course in which students propose to develop a product is followed by a three-credit course in which students carry out detail design, implementation, and prototype testing of their product. Students in four different majors work in multidisciplinary teams of three to five. The faculty are challenged to find ways to assess student achievement that accurately measure individual accomplishment while avoiding excessive faculty effort. Key issues include: fair assessment of relative contributions of hardware designers versus software designers, differing expectations for different majors, assessing a team that cannot demonstrate a functioning integrated system, and fair weighing of contributions among creativity, technical knowledge, analytical ability, ability to debug or troubleshoot, team management, and communication. We share a number of measures we have developed to assess student performance, and discuss how these measures are used to determine both individual student grades as well as assess overall achievement of program learning outcomes.