Abstract:

Widely there is one yet unsolved problem in higher educational examination. Historically, the performance evaluation of students is widely based on final examinations, either at the end of a lecture, lecture series, or finalizing the degree. The temporal snapshot of performance decides on the “objective” performance of the student in this specific context. One question that rises is, if this approach fits in current times. In the past, accessing information at any time was not possible, books needed to be consulted, summaries and extracts needed to be composed by the interested person itself, consulting knowledgeable people in the professional context was the key. Undoubtedly, possessing intrinsic knowledge is also a competitive advantage today. Still, information and summaries of information are nowadays just “one klick away”. The concept of examination has not changed much, though.

In this paper we propose a concept of examination driven learning and teaching, meaning, the examination and evaluation is not a snapshot based one-time event after the educational phase, but part of the latter. The concept is more practical oriented, more alike the everyday situation in the usual working environment, a learning-by-doing approach. In many areas of our daily lives, we gather the greatest learning effect when we do stuff. For example, the best way of learning how to trade stocks and related products is by using the own money – and win and loose it. The best way of performing a tax declaration is not reading about it but doing it. The best way of experiencing the tricky side effects of coding is – do actual coding. Those examples might be generalized and applied to the current widespread concept of examination.

How about letting the examination be part of the educational phase? Concretely, we propose to design exams in a way, that immediate feedback is included in the examination phase. After the examination is finished, the student receives immediate feedback and the correct answer to his/her exam tasks. The exam might then be repeated a specific number of times (or unlimitedly) by the student, according to his/her personal anticipated standard of performance. One might argue that this is not a fair comparison. However, the authors of this paper are of the opinion that the essence is not how well a student is prepared to a one-time situation at a specific point in time influenced by various environmental influences, but how willing he/she is to learn and improve. As information nowadays is available at any time and everywhere, resilience in learning, problem solving, personal standard of performance, and discipline have been moved to the foreground more and more. The concept of examination-based education fills this gap or misalignment of current widespread examination with the real-world situation. One challenge for examiners is for sure to adopt the examination approach, especially in engineering subjects. In this paper we will analyze the situation and as well provide an adequate engineering examination example fulfilling the mentioned requirements.

Keywords:

Examination based education, knowledge increasing examination, optimized industrial workforce, modern teaching approaches.