ICT student projects : Assessing students engaged in the community

To perform successfully in the workplace, employers demand that a new ICT graduate should be equipped with a strong set of technical skills, coupled with a flexible and creative approach to problem solving (Dawson, 2000; Hagan, 2004). To prepare students for their transition to industry, many tertiary institutions incorporate a team project into the final year of their IT and Computing courses (Clear, Young, Goldweber, Leidig, & Scott, 2001). Such projects include diverse technical areas including software development on specialised platforms, hardware design, networking problems and multimedia development. The importance of a software team project in final year computing degrees is without argument (Newman, Daniels, & Faulkner, 2003; Lynch, Goold, & Blain, 2004); however, there is academic debate about how to best achieve ‘industrial strength’ authenticity for students. Should the project problem be one constructed by academic staff? Or should the problem be that of a real client? In this paper we argue the latter case by describing our experiences drawn from supervising student ICT projects done for real clients in the local community across three different institutions. An assessment model for student projects that successfully promotes the development of good graduate attributes and the development of professional processes is detailed. The model includes explicit scaffolding and support structures to aid students engaged in real‐life (and loosely defined) software projects. We argue that assessment of project work is about valuing process as much as product; we also report upon lessons learned from implementing this model at different institutions