Experiments with personal ownership of quality at the University of Texas at El Paso

The lack of commitment to create quality work is a long-standing problem in education, and it is a direct negative driver of student performance, disturbing students´ ability to: apply imparted concepts, build team quality work, and foster industry´s economy. The quality of delivered work is poor mainly because students do not spend needed time and effort to review their own work; e.g., research papers, group projects, and assignments. At the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), experimental developments targeted students´ commitment to create quality work, creating infrastructure to conduct personal reviews for different types of work products, and teaching students to conduct effective personal reviews of their own work. A partial implementation of check lists, review processes, and teaching material has been used in courses at UTEP. The work to be developed includes measuring time distributions of effort (time to build the product vs. time to correct the product), recording the defects injected in products, creating checklists based on the recorded defects, creating a process to review products, and defining a defect log. The goal is to create a habit within students to create quality work by using personal reviews to improve the quality of submitted work.