Reinventing Evaluations With Competency Based Assessments: A Practical Experiment With Future Computer Science Engineers

This innovative practice work-in-progress paper presents a pedagogical device, supported by a tool, moving evaluations at the heart of the learning process. The device gives back to students the control over their own learning and provides them with real-time feedback about their progress. Instructors can also monitor the progress of their classrooms.Designing a proper evaluation is not an easy task for instructors. It must make sense to students and should be adapted to the way they learn. Students are often quite afraid, stressed and not motivated by evaluations whose main perceived role is to achieve a decent grade to succeed the course. The method presented in this paper follows a competency based assessment approach. Each course's objectives are described with a list of competencies to get. Students have to prove they master them by passing evaluations ranging from simple quizzes to projects, including missions, codings and oral interviews. Students can choose the assessments to work on, that best suit their own way of learning. They can present them at their own pace.The proposed pedagogical device and associated developed tool are being tested for the first time during this 2019-2020 academic year. It has been proposed to second-year bachelor to master computer science engineering students, on classrooms with between 17 and 34 people. First feedback collected from students is globally positive and engaging, and the system will undergo a more formal and thorough evaluation.