Assessing The Comprehensive Design Studio Course Through Alternate Methods
2006 Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings
Course assessment typically consists of the review of a course by the teaching faculty member based on student grades from the course. This process, without additional methods, can lead to a false sense of success in a course, and it becomes necessary to find alternate methods for further assessment. For the comprehensive design studio course, alternate methods of assessment have been employed. This course is a semester long architectural and engineering design studio where all phases of an
... itectural design project are covered, from schematic design through design documentation. In addition, the course involves a jury process where practicing architects and engineers attend student presentations twice during the semester at which times the students individually present their projects to the jury. At those times, the jury offers critiques and feedback on the progress of each students design. An additional source used for assessment in this course is based on information from the jury of practicing professionals that attend the student presentations. The juries assess the students' performance and compare this assessment to the jury members' expectations of how they thought the students should have performed. This assessment allows the course professors to evaluate if the end product of the course met the expectations of practicing professionals. For this process, historically the jury members have been given a questionnaire at the end of the semester in which they assess the abilities of the students in respect to the requirements of comprehensive design. This paper will look at the questionnaire presented to the jury members, at the results of the jury assessment for the course, and discuss ways of improving the success of the Comprehensive design studio course based upon this assessment material.