THE USE OF RUBRICS FOR THE EVALUATION OF THE SUBJECTS’ PRACTICES IN ENGINEERING STUDIES, CONSISTING IN SOLVING REAL CASES IN DIRECT CONTACT WITH COMPANIES: THE CASE OF THE PROJECT EVALUA-PRACTIC

Background:
The teaching methodologies need to be renovated in order to promote the active students’ contact with the labour market, specially in the engineering studies. The direct contact between the students and the companies is a key point in the capacitation of engineers, because they need to be not only creative and innovative, but also realistic. The Teaching Innovation Group (TIG) INGENIAQ (University of León, Spain) has started in 2016 an experimental action to put in contact the engineering students and the companies by means of the subjects’ practices. The subjects’ practices consisted on real problems from real companies, that should be solved by the students using a methodology based in two main pillars: i) a direct interaction student-company, and ii) the use of a “flipped classroom” methodology. This has been applied to several subjects, belonging to the following studies: agricultural, environmental, chemical and industrial engineering, at the level of “Degree” and “Master”. However we have faced the problem that this kind of practices which are not the typical ones, are difficult to evaluate. To solve this situation, the TIG INGENIAQ has started the project EVALUA-PRACTIC with the purpose of developing a collaborative evaluation of the subjects’ practices described above.

Objectives:
The general objective of the project EVALUA-PRACTIC was to develop, to test and to evaluate, a methodology based in rubrics, for the evaluation of the subjects’ practices, involving all the actors in the teaching-learning process: The teachers, the representatives from the company, and the students. This work presents the first results of the project. The specific object of this work was to develop a scoring system for the subjects´ practices which is clear, objective and repetitive, based in rubrics.

Methodology used in this work:
In the first stage, the teachers created a rubric for each subject following the next steps: i) to split the work into its component parts, considering the competences to be achieved with the practices; and ii) to stablish a rating scale for each part, providing a detailed description of the yield levels required for acceptance. In the second stage the representatives of the company collaborated in the optimization of the rubric design, taking into account what companies are looking for in the new professionals.

Results and prospective actions:
The work analyses the common and the specific characteristics of the developed rubrics, for the different engineering subjects included in the action. During the second semester of the course 2017-2018, the rubrics will be applied in two different ways: The teachers will evaluate the practical activities of the students, and the students will auto-evaluate their progress. Finally the results obtained by the teachers after the application of the rubric, and those of the auto-evaluation will be compared in order to identify the points of discrepancy, which will indicate the weakness of the system because a lack of alignment between the students perception of the activity and the teacher expectations with it.