Assessment - Guide to Teaching Computer Science: An Activity-Based Approach - page 192

Activities 83-85 address project evaluation and aim to further increase students'
awareness to the challenges involved in this process.

Activity 83: Getting Familiarity with an Evaluation Rubric for Software Projects
An assessment rubric can serve project evaluation either by a group or as
self-assessment (Vivar et al. 2013 ). In this activity, the students in the MTCS
course are presented with the main categories of an evaluation rubric for soft-
ware projects which was developed by two high school CS teachers inde-
pendently (see Table 10.2 ). The two teachers teach two 11th grade classes in
parallel, and since each teacher examines the other teacher's class, he or she is
not familiar with the actual details of the projects he or she evaluates.
The projects for which this evaluation rubric was constructed are devel-
oped by the pupils individually, for about half a school year, when each week
the pupils dedicate about 3 hours for the project process. The material needed
for the development process is learned prior to the development process.
The grade is determined based on an examination of the project file (which
includes the project documentation, its code, and its scope) and an oral exam.
The oral exam takes place in the computer lab, in which, in order to observe
the pupil's familiarity with the code and its functionality, the teacher asks the
pupils specific questions about the project, as well as to modify the project in
specific ways and to add code with specific functionality.
The students in the MTCS course are asked to work in pairs and:

1. To identify the pedagogical purposes of the teachers who developed this
rubric.
2. To specify subcategories of the main categories of the evaluation rubric.
3. To suggest how they would change the evaluation rubric, if at all, to fit it
to their pedagogical approach.

Table 10.2 Example of an evaluation rubric for software projects developed by high school
pupils individually
Topic Max points Actual grade Comments

Project documentation and
organization

10 - -

Project code 10 - -

Project scope 30 - -

Knowledge about the project and its
domain

30 - -

Extension and changes during the lab
exam

20 - -

Total grade 100 - -