e-Rubrics: A Formative as Well as Summative Assessment Tool for Assessment of Course and Program Outcomes

The engineering program accreditation criterion requires an effective course outcome (CO) and program outcome (PO) assessment procedure. To achieve this, an efficient method to estimate student's performance through various assessment tools is required. Many engineering institutes make use of class tests, assignments and final exam as the direct assessment tools for judging the student's knowledge and skills. NBA (National Board of Accreditation) India, questions the approach of using only these tools for COPO attainment as they do not completely reflect to student's specific knowledge and skills. One must come with efficient assessment tools that can evaluate these CO and PO attainments. To address this issue, this paper is drafted to describe various e-rubrics as direct, formative as well as summative assessment tools that can be used to measure the attainment of COs and POs. Formative e-rubrics provide the information about the COs of students that are not attained. This gives an indication to the course instructor of the weaker domains of the students so that he can chalk out a plan to strengthen them. Summative e-rubrics provide a snap-shot of student's performance in a course at course level. At department level, annual assessment of PO attainment helps understand making changes either academic delivery, curriculum problem, or infrastructure issue for the next year.