Assessment weighting of design project-based (DPB) subjects for engineering education

Any form of Design Project-Based (DPB) assessment should be valid, reliable and socially acceptable in that it must not cause offence to students, and must also be trusted and esteemed by those who have to act upon it. As the assessment component is an important issue of the subject, this study seeks to describe the evaluation and development of project-based assessment weighting factors by relating subject assessment results and students’ overall academic performance. In particular, weighting factors for four deliverables commonly included in a DPB subject of the Department of Building Services Engineering at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China, ie verbal progress reports, formal project presentations, written group and individual reports, were determined by maximising the correlation between DPB subject marks and students’ overall academic performance in terms of Grade Point Average (GPA). The problem of organising projects for all students was tackled through an attitudinal survey; the assessment results were collected from the past two academic years. This indicated that formal project presentations associated with the highest correlation coefficients in all sample groups, while verbal progress reports was the lowest.