Assessing undergraduate and postgraduate hard and soft skills in analytics and data science courses

Traditional approaches to assessing undergraduate assignments in the field of software related courses, including Analytics and Data Science courses, involve the course tutors in reading the students’ code and getting the students to physically demonstrate their artefacts. However, this approach tends only to assess the technical skills of solving the set task. It generally fails to assess the many soft skills that industry is looking for, as identified in the e-skills UK (Tech Partnership) / SAS®1 report from Nov 2014 and the associated infographic poster. This paper will describe and evaluate the effectiveness of a different approach to defining the assessment task and formatively and summatively assessing the work of the students in order to effectively evaluate and mark both the soft skills, including creativity, curiosity, storytelling, problem solving and communication, as well as the technical skills. This approach works effectively at all levels of undergraduate and masters courses