Abstract:

The assessment of the competencies in the new European higher education system supposes a big challenge to the European Universities in general and to the University of Cádiz in particular, owing, on the one hand, by the lack of resources to carry out this difficult task and, on the other hand, by the high number of students in the lecture room.
The members of the group that present this summary participate in an Innovation Project entitled “Design, Implementation and Analysis of Activities for the Assessment of Competencies in the degree" (2009/2011).The team is constituted by fifteen professors who teach in different degrees at the University of Cádiz. This group has developed a glossary of activities to assess generic skills in different degrees like Marine Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Chemistry, etc. In this work the team describes some activities, among them, assessment of self-criticism capacity competence. This way, different subjects from the diverse degrees were selected to evaluate this competence and how it was going to be performed. In several of them, students were asked just at the end of their final exam for writing in the class list what mark did he/she expect from the exam. Next, the marks obtained after revision of the exams by the professors were compared with those written by the students. There were a high percentage of students, whose marks were lesser than they expected, and only a few students got the same marks. These results could be explained as a lack of self-criticism in a wide range of students. The higher percentage of students whose marks were above the professor mark, corresponded to those with marks lesser than 4.9 (failed). The behaviour observed can be explained in general, but not as a rule, since the higher percentage of students with a lack of self-criticism corresponds to those called as ‘bad students’. On the other hand, in students with good exams and so, high marks, the tendency is practically the opposite. They used to be more critical with themselves than the professors. These results show the strengths of this activity model allowing us to assess self-criticism capacity competence in higher education students for various subjects of different degrees.

Keywords:

Assessment of competencies, Higher Education, capacity self-criticism, degree.