Journal of Engineering Education Transformations

Abstract

Many students are being struggled with high level programming related courses. It is an enthusiastic and dynamic approach to teach and assess such courses for the development of their programming skills. Also, traditional approach to evaluate such high-level programmingoriented courses is with list of programs repeatedly being followed in consecutive batches as well as theory exam is conducted that generally focuses on remembering/understanding oriented questions. During the study tenure, students get very less opportunities to write or solve technical problems or tasks as per the IT industry needs as well as they get struggle to be selected in a reputed IT company by clearing the technical examination through the campus drive. Also, IT companies do not follow only the mechanism i.e., “writing code from scratch for all projects”. In fact, many more situations arise where students must outperform similarly. Such circumstances can be discovered depending on the work culture, constraints, coding elegance, etc. within each industry. Proposed method is one of such mechanisms out of these i.e., each problem is being divided into different tasks. Each task may represent a requirement of client or a set of small requirements. Here, the proposed innovative methodology is “Task Based Assessment (TBA)” for high level programming-oriented courses. This would focus on outcome based learning and innovative assessment approaches. The results obtained with the conventional approach are compared to the results obtained with the TBA approach, and it is discovered that a greater number of students obtained more than B+ grade (>=70%) with the proposed TBA approach, as also statistically proven. This correlation indicates that students are more conscious and interested in the TBA approach as opposed to mugged up & writing hypothetical ideas into the examinations. Furthermore, student feedback has been found to be extremely positive. Also, this would helpstudents to improve their programming skills to cope with the IT industry challenges. Keywords: High Level Programming Languages, Programming Skills, Technical Skills, IT Industry Challenges, Task Based Assessment, Innovative Assessment