ASSESSING COMPETENCES IN ENGINEERING DEGREES. COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE AS A CASE OF STUDY

The assessment of competences acquired by students throughout the course has become an essential part of the teaching-learning process within the framework of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). The change in the processes of educational planning and teaching activity has led to a significant adjustment to the students' evaluation considering their cognitive, instrumental and attitudinal aspects. In general, the new assessment models have allowed a greater feedback to the student (compared to traditional methods), making easier the development of specific and transversal competences that have to be acquired in a degree. This paper proposes a method for competence assessment that combines continuous assessment of the knowledge, skills and attitudes acquired by the students along with the assessment from a traditional final exam. As a case of study of the proposed method, the experience in the assessment system for the Computer Architecture course of the Computer Engineering of the University of Alicante is presented. For this purpose, the academic results obtained by the students with different assessment systems will be analysed.