Design of an objective assessment tool to evaluate students’ basic electrical engineering skills: the OSTE

This report discusses the developmental stage of a Higher Education Academy (HEA) – Engineering Subject Centre project which concerns the designing of an objective assessment tool to evaluate students' basic electrical engineering skills. The form of assessment is based on the principle of Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE), which is an assessment method already widely adopted in healthcare education. Since it is being used in a different field, this form of OSCE has been named Objective Structured Technical Examination (OSTE). The approach used to develop the exercises included in the OSTE will be discussed. This project will ultimately look at the effectiveness of this method of finding out the basic engineering abilities of a group of students and how it could be used to gear teaching towards any important or specific weaknesses that are discovered among the group. 58 Design of an objective assessment tool to evaluate students' basic electrical engineering skills: the OSTE Introduction This paper reports the development of a new approach to the assessment of engineering students' skills, called the OSTE, in the School of Electronic, Communication and Electrical Engineering. OSTE stands for Objective Structured Technical Examination and it is derived from a well-developed assessment method used in a wide range of healthcare disciplines and called the OSCE (Objective Structured Clinical Examination). The key feature of this assessment method, unlike the assessed laboratory sessions or engineering projects to which students are often subjected, is that it provides a means of objectively measuring their individual performance and can relate to a very wide range of analytical and practical skills. It is often possible to give students the final mark on their performance at the end of the session and hence to reduce the marking burden of lecturers, but it does require the commitment of a large academic team to individually assess the students during the session.