Abstract:

The purpose of this paper is to present a proposal for assessing transversal competences to be achieved by students once completed their Degree Final Project (DFP). It intends to provide both the academic authorities and the professors with guidelines to identify how and at what time and phases of the DFP it’s possible to evaluate those transversal skills stated on the graduate studies plan of Business Administration at the University of Barcelona. In doing so, it also aims to analyze the use of rubrics system to facilitate the overall evaluation process.

Although there is not a commonly accepted definition of rubric at the University level, we may define it as a document that articulates the expectations on the students work through the specification of the criteria of evaluation and the graduated description of quality levels in its execution in qualitative terms (Simon, 2001;) Andrade, 2000; Reddy & Andrade, 2010; Estapé et al, 2012).

Following Popham (1997), a rubric has three essential features (evaluative criteria, quality definitions, and a scoring strategy) that make it a very good system to evaluate such an especial subject as the Degree Final Project (DFP). First of all it sets up those evaluative criteria that professors might bear in mind when assessing student’s work. Secondly, it defines different quality levels for each evaluative criterion. And finally, it represents a scoring strategy that translate quality judgments into a quantitative score that may be used (or not) to make a single overall quality score.