Toward a Better Assessment of Students Outcomes using a Six-Steps method and a Class Diagram

The achievement of the ABET Students Outcomes (SOs) aims to ensure the good preparation of the students to the workplace. The evaluation of the SOs attainment faces many problems including the partial achievement of SO and the appropriate mapping of the assessment tools to SOs. Furthermore, the complexity and heaviness of the evaluation process require a 2-4 years improvement cycle to avoid faculty overloading. In this work, initially, a class diagram is developed which shows the classes of the system, their attributes, operations and the relationships among objects. Further, we propose a six-steps methodology that aims to better undertake the assessment of the SOs for an IT program. The first step proceeds to the preparation of an articulation matrix that maps the IT program courses to the SOs. The second step decomposes each SO into its Elementary contents (SOEs) in order to target each SOE separately and contribute to the full achievement of the SO. The detailed articulation matrix is prepared in the third step to include the new list of SOEs. While undertaking the semester-based assessments, the fourth step consists in mapping the assessment tools and questions to the appropriate SOEs using the Bloom's measurable verbs. At the end of the semester, the fifth step is undertaken to input the assessment data for each SOE. The final sixth step proceeds to the analysis of the assessment data to outline important results at both course and program levels. This work is undertaken at the Faculty of Computing and Information Technology in Rabigh (FCITR), King Abdulaziz University, and will be soon supported by a web-based system that helps in the implementation of the six-steps methodology, which will considerably shorten the improvement cycle