Examinable course assessment tool based on outcome based education

Abstract

Engineering program offered in Malaysia nowadays, has to be accredited by the Engineering Accreditation Council (EAC) which represents the Board of Engineers Malaysia (BEM) in order to be recognized by Washington Accord signatories' country. Such accreditation would benefit the graduates to look for jobs globally. Outcome-based education (OBE) has become a critical aspect of accreditation requirement and Faculty of Electrical Engineering at Universiti Teknologi MARA has made adaption to both; curriculum and instructional approaches following OBE specifications. OBE is a student-centered learning process that focuses on measuring students' achievement in accordance with the faculty program outcomes based on summative and formative assessments. The faculty has developed several summative assessment tools that are user-friendly to the lecturers using on-shelf technology. These tools are custom-designed to measure student's knowing and doing for the following components: examinable course, course work, laboratories and final year project. The tool for evaluating an examinable course is known as SAMOBEC; acronym for Summative Dynamic Assessment with OBE Compliance. Therefore, this paper describes the utilization of the tool and evaluation for an undergraduate course; ESE352 (Signals and Systems II). This tool would guide lecturers to construct examinable questions structurally based on Bloom's Taxonomy as well as addressing respective course outcomes and program outcomes. The tool would produce outputs that show information about question density on course and program outcomes. Finally, it would provide performance indicators that reflect the students' achievement in addressing the respective course and program outcomes. It is shown that, the systematic approach adopted in this tool has educated and improved academician alertness in designing questions fairly as well as providing them with an insight of their student's attributes.