Assessing Large Project Courses: Model, Activities, and Lessons Learned

In a modern computing curriculum, large project courses are essential to give students hands-on experience of working in a realistic software engineering project. Assessing such projects is, however, extremely challenging. There are various aspects and tradeoffs of assessments that can affect the course quality. Individual assessments can give fair grading of individuals, but may loose focus of the project as a group activity. Extensive teacher involvement is necessary for objective assessment, but may affect the way students are working. Continuous feedback to students can enhance learning, but may be hard to combine with fair assessment. Most previous work is focusing on some specific assessment aspect, whereas we in this paper present an assessment model that consists of a collection of assessment activities, each covering different aspects. We have applied, developed, and improved these activities during a seven-year period. To evaluate the usefulness of the model, we perform questionnaire-based surveys over a two-years period. Furthermore, we design and execute an experiment that studies to what extent students can perform fair peer assessment and to what degree the assessments of students and teachers agree. We analyze the results, discuss findings, and summarize lessons learned