a C Omparison of D Evelopmental

Abstract

Cooperative education (co-op) is an important and mandatory part of undergraduate engineering at the University of Victoria (UVic). Because of this close integration with the curriculum, the Faculty of Engineering has chosen to use co-op employer evaluations of students as part of the assessment of the CEAB graduate attributes. This paper will describe the two employer surveys currently in use at UVic: one administered by the university’s co-op office and repurposed for attribute assessment; and a second, possibly unique in Canada, designed expressly for employer assessment of the attributes. Results are presented from each, showing our employers tend to rank students highly in attributes such as Knowledge Base, Ethics and Equity, and Life-Long Learning, but lower in Economics and Project Management. When results from the two surveys are combined, we find systematic differences between the responses from the two tools. We conclude that caution is needed when combining results from different assessment tools. Keywords: