Outcome based evaluation of curriculum goals completion for engineering education

In engineering education certification, the graduation-requirements achievement evaluation is usually carried out by use of curriculum-score-analysis method. The traditional curriculum scores consist of the final exam scores, attendance marks, in-class-tests' scores and other indicators, which have no connection with the graduation outcomes. The teachers organize teaching activities without knowing what kind of teaching practices have most contributions to the graduation requirements. In this paper, we take the basic compulsory curriculum "The principles of imaging sensors" of the specialty of remote sensing science and technology (School of remote sensing and information engineering, Wuhan University) as an example and proposes the curriculum-goal-completion evaluation method to replace the traditional curriculum score analysis. We study the definition and the decomposition of curriculum goals based on the graduation requirements. Then the assessment of the course, the choice of teaching content and the organization of teaching methods are carried out to complete the curriculum goals. Through the research we transform the traditional test score based curriculum assessment to the “curriculum-goal- completion” evaluation which is consistent with the `Outcome Based Education' concepts. We also adopt a reasonable and systematic approach to calculate the curriculum-goals-completion percentage. Our work will provide supports for the continuous improvement of engineering education and references for the national engineering education certification.