EVALUATION TASK IN EUROPEAN HIGHER EDUCATION: A CASE STUDY

Spanish higher education is currently adapting to the three cycle degree system of the European Higher Education Area. Therefore, two structures currently coexist in university education in general and in Engineering and Architecture in particular at the first cycle: The pre-European Higher Education short cycle degree which takes three years long and the new structure organized in four courses.
One of the most important challenges in this adaptation is the Evaluation of the Students Learning. The purpose of this paper is to compare different ways of evaluation of the students learning in the framework of Bologna Declaration and ECTS principles. From many years ago, the Polytechnic School of Engineering in the University of Oviedo (EPIG from now on) has been working on this adaptation such that teachers have been tested different learning and teaching methodologies as well as some evaluation methodologies. Specifically, the course of Automata and Discrete Mathematics (ADM) of the old pre-European Higher Education Computer Science degree has taken part in this project. During the previous courses we have tested different evaluation methodologies, and we have compared them to decide what methodology should be applied in the ADM course of the new Information Technology degree at EPIG.
ADM course is mainly theoretical. The skills developed in this course are: (1) To model real problems as a graph, (2) To solve real problems by applying graph properties and algorithms, (3) To build Finite Automata for a given language, (4) To describe a Regular Language and (5) To identify Context free Languages.
These skills have been evaluated in a different way during the last two academic courses. In both cases the students can pass the course by summing the mark they obtain in an exam at the end of the course and the mark obtained with the different activities proposed by the teachers along the course.
In course 2008-2009 we apply the students for different oral and written presentations about how to solve different real problems. During the course 2009-2010 we have controlled their learning along the course just with three evaluation points at the end of the three blocks in which the course is divided. In both cases, these works were evaluated, representing the same percentage of the final mark.
Results show that during the course 2009-2010 there is a strong relationship between the marks that students in continuous assessment get and the final exam. However, in the former 2008-2009, the results from continuous assessment where much better than those they obtained in the final exam. Meanwhile, many students passed thanks to all the tests they’ve done in continuous assessment despite getting really low marks in the final exam.
The conclusion we get from this experience is the following: during the course 2008-2009 maybe students learnt how to write a report or the necessary skills to give presentations but they were unable to acquire the subject contents. Thus, there would be necessary a much more effective control on students but this would not be possible unless reducing the number of students per group.
Therefore, during the course 2010-2011 we have introduced a mixed evaluation methodology: the students have an exam at the end of the course, as well as one at the end of each module. In addition, their active participation is also evaluated.