Rubrics for evaluating communication, teamworking, and lifelong learning skills, as well as skills related to broad education/contemporary issues.

Rubrics: Here are the links to the individual rubrics, the outcome or outcomes each is intended to evaluate, and a brief explanation. (The official list of objectives and outcomes for the BS-CSE program is available elsewhere. Throughout this page, "outcome" refers to an outcome of the BS-CSE program.)

1. Team-working skills: Outcome (d) reads, "an ability to function on multi-disciplinary teams". This rubric is used to evaluate the achievement of this outcome in each of the capstone design courses. The rubric evaluates the student's teamworking skills along three dimensions, these being: contribution to the team project, taking responsibility, and valuing other team members.

2. Oral communication skills (rubric for individual presentations; rubric for team presentations): Outcome (g) reads, "an ability to communicate effectively". These skills are evaluated in CSE 601, the required course on social and ethical issues in computing, and in the capstone design courses. The presentations in 601 are individual presentations; the capstone courses include a mix of individual and team presentations. The rubric for individual presentations evaluates the presentation along four dimensions, these being, organization, mechanics, delivery, and relating audience. The rubric for team presentation includes an additional dimension, contribution as a team member, but also revises some of the other dimensions to account for team factors. [Written communication skills which are part of this outcome are evaluated using the rubrics listed in the next two items.]

3. Professional/ethical issues; broad education; knowledge of contemporary issues; written communication skills: Outcome (f) reads, "an understanding of professional and ethical responsibility"; outcome (h) reads, "the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic, environmental, and societal context"; and outcome (j) reads, "a knowledge of contemporary issues". Students in CSE 601 are required to explore a new or recent product or practice or event, consider the impact it may have in a "global, economic, environmental, and societal context" (outcome (h)); consider as well any relevant contemporary issues (outcome (j)) as well as ethical and professional issues (outcome (f)) related to the product, practice, or event; and present the findings in a 3-4 page paper. This paper is evaluated using a rubric that includes dimensions corresponding to each of these factors, as well as dimensions corresponding to the effectiveness of the writing. The dimensions included in the rubric are: awareness of global effects; understanding of economic factors; awareness of implications to society at large; awareness of other contemporary issues (political, cultural, etc.); understanding of ethical and professional issues; organization of the paper; and style of presentation.

4. Lifelong learning skills; written communication skills: Outcome (i) reads, "a recognition of the need for, and an ability to engage in life-long learning". Each of the capstone courses requires the student to explore a new tool, technology, or process and write a three or four page paper on it. The student must research the tool on his or her own, evaluate its appropriateness for its intended (and possibly other) purposes, compare it with alternative tools that may be available, and write a clear and succinct paper reporting the findings. Someone reading the paper should be able to get a good idea of the tool's capabilities, how well it might serve its purposes, what other alternatives might exist and what their strengths and weaknesses might be. The rubric to evaluate this paper includes the following dimensions: research/gathering information; analysis/evaluation; presentation of ideas/organization of paper; and style.

   An alternative approach: Several of the capstone design course instructors have felt, over the last couple of years, that the requirement of such a paper was too distracting for the students and that it took too much of their focus away from the central design project. Hence they have come up with an alternative approach to achieving this outcome while, at the same time, engaging students in another team activity. The approach here is to require groups of 4-5 students each to form "technology teams". These teams are "orthogonal" to the project teams; i.e., typically each technology team of, say, 4 students, will consist of one student from each of four different project teams. Each technology team will identify a particular relevant (to the area of the particular course) topic, for example, "sound" or "physics" (in the case of CSE 786, the games capstone); each student in the team will be assigned responsiblity for one aspect of the particular topic and be expected to research the topic. The team will then make a presentation to the entire class on the topic with each student talking about the particular aspect that he/she is responsible for. Essentially, the team will be available, throughout the quarter, as a resource to the entire class for questions dealing with the particular topic. Like the other approach, it requires the students to research the particular questions they are responsible for but to do so as part of a team research the particular topic. Equally importantly, the approach would seem to help improve students' skills with respect to understanding issues since they will be responsible for addressing serious questions from other students in the class. Moreover, students see the importance of lifelong learning as part of implementing their project, not simply as a skill that might come in useful at some point in their careers. We have developed a revised version of the lifelong learning rubric for use in evaluating this activity: rubric for assessing technology research as part of a technology team.