FIRST-YEAR VERSUS FOURTH-YEAR AND ONLINE VERSUS PAPER-AND-PENCIL RESPONSES TO A GRADUATE ATTRIBUTE SELF-ASSESSMENT TOOL AND EXIT SURVEY
A tool has been created that allows students to self-assess how well their program helped them achieve CEAB graduate attributes. These indirect self-assessments are used at the University of Waterloo in the Mechanicaland Mechatronics Engineering (MME) Department along with more direct measurements to inform analysis of programs. The tool uses an online survey platform to allow for randomized presentation of a subset of prompts related to the graduate attributes to each student in order to reduce the number of questions posed to any one student while ensuring coverage of all attributes.This tool has been deployed to first-year and fourth-year cohorts, and the differences in students’ self-assessments are discussed, in particular the increase in self-awareness that is expected to occur between first and fourth-year. The tool has also been deployed as part of an online exit survey administered to fourth-year students only, and similarities and differences in survey responses for online versus paper-and-pencil are discussed especially as they relate to free-form responses