Formalising and Evaluating the Assessment of Engineering Professional Skills

Hadisantono, . (2020) Formalising and Evaluating the Assessment of Engineering Professional Skills. Doctoral thesis, The University of Auckland.

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Abstract

In engineering program accreditation, there are two areas of expertise, commonly distinguished as “hard engineering skills” and “soft engineering skills”. Soft engineering skills, which are also known as Engineering Professional Skills (EPS), include skills such as communication, teamwork, ethical responsibility, professionalism, awareness of the impact of engineering solutions on society, life-long learning and understanding of contemporary issues. These EPS skills are critical for success in today’s engineering careers. Assessing EPS as part of engineering program outcomes in accreditation remains problematic. It tends to be difficult and requires more labour and time than assessing hard engineering skills which perhaps is adequately done by paper-based test methods (ideally including both pre-tests and post-tests). Furthermore, for a developing country like Indonesia (and some other countries), there is an issue that the outcome of engineering program curriculum should also meet the domestic needs. Unfortunately, this requirement is not covered by the existing assessment method. This thesis addresses EPS assessment in an Indonesian setting where the curriculum must simultaneously cover both the national (core) curriculum and the local (institutional) curriculum, with the latter requiring (by government decree) awareness of and sensitivity to domestic issues. This thesis presents the modification of the existing Engineering Professional Skill Assessment (EPSA) rubric to include assessment of local cultural competency. The rubric was evaluated in two cycles of action research with Indonesian tertiary students.

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