(107c) Perspectives on Alternative Assessment in Core Chemical Engineering Courses

The switch to fully-online courses during the COVID-19 pandemic required a rethinking of how we measure attainment of student learning outcomes, as we traditionally relied on in-class exams or long-form reports as the primary modes of assessment in our lecture- and lab-based courses, respectively. In several core courses at our university, we replaced these traditional assessments with alternatives. In lower-level courses, we restructured and rebranded quizzes and exams as “checkpoints,” regularly spaced across the semester, which comprised of some typical homework and exam questions but included extensions to these questions, such as identification and reflection related to specific learning outcomes. In our senior-level precursor to capstone design, we implemented portfolios, in which students created their own prompts and solutions to demonstrate their learning. In one semester of our laboratory sequence, we used the opportunity to reflect anew on course goals and replaced a good portion of our traditional writing assignments with live “in-person” meetings, with the added benefit of giving students more practice writing in different formats (such as short reports and memos) as well as running their own meetings with faculty, creating agendas and minutes. Each of our changes in assessment had their trade-offs, primarily in terms of time required: to communicate expectations to students working in these modes for the first time, as well as to provide accurate grades and meaningful feedback.

Checkpoints were used to replace traditional timed in-class exams for both our material and energy balance and engineering statistics courses. These comprised of a short “same-day” component (meant to be completed within 24 hours of posting to our learning management system) followed by a “long-term” component (meant to be completed in 3-5 days, in place of a weekly homework assignment). The long-term component included additional prompts to identify which learning outcomes were demonstrated by completing the technical problems, and identifying other problems from class, reading, or homework that helped students feel confident in their work. These reflective components helped to ensure some level of academic integrity – no two students would submit the same reflection – though it is unclear whether or not this prevented students discussing the other problems during these “take-home” activities. We have resumed in-person classes but still use a modification to this checkpoint system rather than return to fully in-class timed exams. Now we hold a take-home exam over the span of 4-6 days, and the day the exam is due is followed by a short in-class quiz, with the intention that preparing well for the exam serves as good preparation for the in-class quiz. So far there is generally good correlation between the two components of a checkpoint, and we have substantially fewer students requesting accommodations (extra time on tests, etc) because of the flexibility of the take-home exam and focus of the in-class quiz. Grading checkpoints takes no more or less faculty time as compared to traditional exams.

In our senior lab course, historically teams of students prepare lengthy (25+ pages) reports on unit operation labs. In our fully-online version, these reports were broken into small components, requiring regular meetings in Zoom with course faculty. For example, the distillation lab documentation was replaced with three smaller writing assignments, each of which related to one another, rather than just revisions and lengthening compared to previous years. Students also gained practice with many more forms of written communication – memo and short-report formats, communication of agendas and meeting minutes, and preparing things other than PowerPoint slides to present and meet with course faculty. Faculty grading time was broken up into smaller, often contemporaneous grading during or shortly after meetings, requiring a different kind of attention compared to reading lengthy one-off reports.

In our first semester of our two-semester senior design sequence, traditional exams on equipment sizing and sequencing, economics, and process safety were replaced with portfolio assignments. In a portfolio, each student created 2-3 problems of their own together with sample solutions, given a list of learning outcomes and constraints as to how the work should be presented. Students reported feeling much more confident about their learning, and scores on portfolios were generally very good, in agreement with student perceptions. However, this form of assessment is much more substantial than a traditional exam, so care needs to be taken in defining constraints and rubrics to help faculty use their time well in scoring and providing feedback.