Work in progress: A balancing act - Evolution of assessments in an introductory programming course in ECE after curriculum redesign

Abstract

As enrollment grows in Electrical and Computer Engineering, it becomes an increasingly challenging task to implement appropriate assessments in large introductory courses to accurately evaluate student learning, while adhering to given resource constraints. This is especially challenging in programming courses, where the natural environment for evaluation requires a one to one ratio of student to terminal. On the other hand, purely computer-based assessments take away the opportunity to examine one's understanding of main concepts - students must have true comprehension of the materials when there is no terminal available to hack to get the correct answer. Additionally, curriculum redesign brings another layer of difficulty and also opportunity for improvement, which makes choosing and designing assessments a crucial task. In this paper, we will discuss the three phases of change in assessments in a sophomore-level introductory programming course in ECE after curriculum redesign. Details of each phase will be presented along with challenges, lessons learned and the motivation for improvement. We also study and analyze student perception on these assessments in terms of fairness in content and grading. The results are shown in a longitudinal comparison across six semesters.