Defining competencies of a course as per standards

Course design provides teachers an organizing framework for understanding the role and significance of many of the new ideas on teaching and allows them to address many of the issues they face in the classroom. This paper addresses two aspects of course design, namely competencies and test items in alignment with identified competencies. A method of writing competencies and test items and tagging them to achieve the desired alignment has been suggested. The attributes with which the competencies are tagged include besides others Blooms cognitive levels and categories of knowledge including those of Engineering as proposed by Vincenti. Furthermore, a representation of competencies and aligned test items has been suggested using standards defined by IEEE and IMS Global.