Abstract:

This article will analyse both the benefits and drawbacks of the new evaluation system carried out in the subject “non-lineal analysis of concrete structures” of the master in concrete engineering in the Polytechnic University of Valencia.

First of all, it is to say that new advances in legislation, educative research and recommendations from the Council of Europe have suggested that educative systems have to evolve.

For this reason, making changes on the teaching methods used will allow us to be able to adapt the studies to our students and social needs. At this point, we will talk about an innovation we have introduced in the already mentioned subject. It has consisted of changing the evaluation process completely. In this subject, neither tests nor final exams will evaluate the student's achievement. On the contrary, they are assessed by a team work project.

This is due to the fact that we strongly believe this field of study needs some cross curricular competences that cannot be achieved with theoretical and practical lessons in isolation or assessed by a common test. Taking this into account, projects seemed to be the best option we could develop. There are several reasons that support this idea and we will briefly comment on some of them.

For instance, projects allow our students to thrive on in a way that combines both practice and theory interconnected. Consequently, our learners will become more qualified as they will be used to take on tasks that will probably be required for their future jobs. Among this kind of abilities we could highlight planning, making decisions, listening to others, reaching agreements, work in teams, distributing responsibilities and using their creativity and knowledge to overcome the difficulties that will appear along the process.

All of these abilities are the so-called cross curricular competences that need to be achieved through different areas in order for the learner to be capable of facing the new working demands. Moreover, we could comprise all of them in a single one: entrepreneurship. This is the ability of building on a project successfully, from the planning to the final results, using theory and practice to solve all the problems along the process. This also achieves that our students will become more autonomous learners and future workers and this project is what we evaluate.

In this communication we will show the marks that our students have obtained with their projects and also the surveys that students have answered. We will make a summary of all of them and we will talk about the positive and negative aspects that we have concluded. Of course, improvement measures will be proposed and we hope that other departments could be inspired by this practice.