Assessment Results and Evaluation

1. POCAT Results:
   • Spring '17 results (Group 1); test
   • Spring '17 results (Group 2); test
   • Autumn '16 results (Group 1); test
   • Spring '16 results (Group 1); test
   • Autumn '15 results (Group 1); test

2. Rubric Results:
   • CSE 2501/Phil 1338: Spring '17; Aurumn '16
   • Capstone Course, Instructor Rubric: Spring '17; Autumn '16
   • Capstone Course, Poster Session: Spring '17; Autumn '16

3. Exit-survey results:
   • Student Outcomes (for last several years).
   • Free-form questions: 2014; 2015; 2016

4. Alumni-survey results (these surveys are performed every other year):
   • Importance of PEOs and Extent to which graduates were prepared for achieving the PEOs for 2012, '14, '16
   • Most useful aspect of program: 2014; 2016
   • One aspect of program that should be changed (in the 2012 survey, the two questions about "useful aspect" and "aspect that should be changed" were posed as one question, rather than two; all the results for that question are collected in the page at the 2012 link below):
     2012; 2014; 2016

5. Annual forum reports: 2017; 2016; 2015

6. Some recent improvements: Several recent improvements are listed in the self-study. Here we consider some others (for the most part, more recent ones):
   • Guidelines for capstone design course posters: Following the use of the capstone poster session rubric during Au '16 and Sp '17, there was extensive email discussion among several members of UGSC and key people involved with the capstone design courses. An importatant conclusion was that while students, in their interactions with the guests at the session were quite effective, their posters did not address the items they were expected to. The capstone course instructors then came up with a set of guidelines that should help address this problem. The plan is the instructor of each section of each capstone course to distribute the guidelines to the students a couple of weeks before the poster session and have a discussion in class about the expectations of their posters in particular; and about what makes for effective posters, in general.
     A copy of the guidelines is here.
   • We also realized, during these discussions that our current rubric had some key flaws in it which made the feedback that we could get from the people who completed the rubric not quite as useful as we had expected. For example, the term "sponsor" was not always appropriate since some of the projects did not come from outside sponsors but rather were essentially generated based on discussions in the particular class; e.g., in the game design course, student teams came up with proposals for particular games, presented it to the class, got feedback from the instructor, revised the proposals based on that, and then proceeded to implement the game; in the Watson-based class, again student teams had to propose suitable ideas for project that would exploit facilities provided by Watson (or by other similar systems), and go through a similar approach. For another example, the characterization of the levels of achievement as "Average" etc. seemed inappropriate (being norm-based) when assessing students readiness to become computing professionals. Hence we revised those levels to be criterion-based although the levels such as "exemplary" are not explicitly defined; if that proves problematic, we will revisit that.
     The revised rubric is available here.
   • We recently realized, during a discussion in a UGSC meeting of the assessment results based on the use of the rubric in a section of CSE 2501 that there were some weaknesses in that rubric. Specifically, it did not assess how well the student based his/her arguments on appropriate ethical issues and principles including especially computing issues. We have therefore come up with a (prototype) revision of the rubric which will be discussed in an upcoming UGSC meeting for possible adoption.
     This revised version is available here.

7. Minutes of some UGSC meetings: The minutes of some recent UGSC meetings where assessment results as well as other feedback from various constituents was discussed is available here.