IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EDUCATION, VOL. 41, NO.

1, FEBRUARY 1998 25

A Systematic Approach to the Implementation

of Final Year Project in an Electrical
Engineering Undergraduate Course
C. Y. Teo and D. J. Ho

Abstract— This paper describes a computerized management At the Nanyang Technological University, in the School of
system for the processing of final year project in an electrical Electrical and Electronic Engineering, we have grown from an
engineering undergraduate course including a structured project annual enrollment of 200 students in 1985 to more than 600 in
allocation to students, a comprehensive assessment procedure, an
automated processing of marks, and a management supporting 1996. The number of academic staff has also risen from 20 to
system. An optical reader is used to scan the project selection 180. To cope with the large number of students and academic
made by all the students, and the allocation algorithm allocates as staff, we have revamped the process management of the FYP.
many projects as possible in meeting the students’ preferences. A In this paper our approach for a systematic implementation is
new attempt using a grading category index for each assessment outlined. This includes a structured way to source for project
criterion is implemented and the assessment of the student’s
performance is evaluated through five main components with 31 proposals and allocate them, a comprehensive assessment pro-
assessment criteria. The marks for each student are scanned by cedure, an automated processing of marks for a fast turnaround
an optical reader and calculated by a weighted linear conversion of the results, and finally, the generation of various reports
of all the grading category indexes. The assessment system is which give us feedback on the whole implementation process.
more valid as it has many specific criteria and more reliable as We found that this has led to better allocation of resources,
the process is consistent. The management supporting tools and
experiences in handling very large groups of students especially clearer assessment guidelines, closer link of students’ efforts
in the maintenance of a uniform marking standard to all the to their grades, better quality control, and a huge time savings
students are highlighted. It is hoped that some of our approaches in the overall management of the whole process.
can be selectively adopted for undergraduate course work on
continuous assessment even for a smaller student population. II. STRUCTURED PROJECT PROPOSAL AND ALLOCATION
Index Terms—Assessment, computerized management system, Each member of the academic staff submits two to three
senior projects, student projects. projects. Some 70% of the projects originate from the staff’s
own research interests while the other 30% originate from the
industry. The industry projects are evaluated for suitability by
I. INTRODUCTION staff members. All the project proposals are then evaluated,
HE final year project (FYP) is a major component of
T the undergraduate course in electrical engineering. The
FYP is allocated six academic units which is equivalent to
edited, and collated by the FYP committee and a complete list
of projects is mailed to all students before the commencement
of the semester. During the academic year 1995/1996, from
two subjects in the final year. The project work is assigned at the submission made by 180 academic staff members, a total
the beginning of Semester 1 and runs till the end of Semester of 413 projects were accepted and 330 projects were allocated
2. Each student is expected to spend 10 h a week over 26 to 660 students.
weeks in two semesters for the whole year. The FYP provides The main criterion that the FYP committee uses to accept
for the student to develop problem solving, analysis, synthesis, a project is that it must involve at least one of the following
and evaluation skills. A typical project format would require elements: in-depth study, investigation, construction of hard-
the student to see how some aspect of theory or hardware ware and/or development of software, and testing in any of
that they are familiar with can be enhanced or developed into the areas of specialized courses offered in a final year option
a product or a hardware/software tool [1], [2]. Each project group. Preferably, the project should consist of both hardware
is undertaken by two students and supervised and assessed and software.
by one academic staff member throughout the year. Toward The students organize themselves into groups of two and
the end of the project, a moderator is appointed to give an each group chooses ten projects in order of preference from
independent assessment of the project report, quality of the the project list. The students are allowed to discuss the project
work done, and the students’ accomplishments. with the prospective supervisor but the supervisors are not
allowed to select a particular group of students.
The names of the two students and their ten preferred project
Manuscript received October 1996; revised November 1997. numbers are submitted on a specific form. These forms are then
The authors are with the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering,
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798. scanned by an optical reader and processed by a computer
Publisher Item Identifier S 0018-9359(98)01678-1. program AssignProj written in C. The program allocates
0018–9359/98$10.00  1998 IEEE
26 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EDUCATION, VOL. 41, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 1998

TABLE I
STUDENT PREFERENCE AND THE ALLOCATED PROJECTS

TABLE II
SUMMARY OF THE ALLOCATED PROJECTS FOR EACH OPTION AREA

projects based on the order of preference from students from usually occurs in the first 45 cycles within the first hour
their first to tenth preferences. Projects that are chosen by although the allocation process is repeated for 24 h. Table
only one group of students as their first preference will be I indicates the total number of the allocated projects for each
assigned straight away to the respective group of students. If category of student preference. Student preference from 11th
there are more than one group of students choosing a particular to 16th refers to those project allocated in the second-round
project as their first preferences, a random number will be processing. It is noted that 70% of the students are allocated
generated. This random number ranges from one to the total within their first three preferences and only 12% of the students
number of student groups that have chosen that project as have to make a second-round selection. Table II gives a
their first choice. That particular project will be temporarily summary of the allocated projects for each option field. For
assigned to a particular group according to the generated those popular projects, a single project may be chosen by as
random number. After processing the first preferences of all many as 40–50 student groups. Most of the projects are chosen
the students, the same method is repeated for all the remaining by 5–10 student groups. There are however 18 projects (4%)
unassigned students starting from their second preference and which are not selected by any student.
up to the tenth preference. At the end of this allocation cycle,
the configuration of the project assignment and the number of
the unassigned student groups are recorded. III. STREAMLINED ASSESSMENT CRITERIA
A subsequent allocation cycle is repeated in exactly the In order to give a reliable, valid and fair judgment on
same way as in the previous cycle. A new project assignment the performance of the student [3], careful thought must be
together with the new number of unassigned student groups given to the assessment process. Two important concepts
are obtained and compared with the number of the unassigned in assessment are validity and reliability. Validity concerns
student groups in the previous cycle. The program always what is being assessed [4], [5], whereas reliability concerns
keeps the configuration of project assignment that has a lower the consistency of the measurements used. Some concepts
number of the unassigned student groups. Through simultane- of validity from relevant literature [6] which are applicable
ous processing of more than a thousand allocation cycles over are appropriateness and criterion validity. In drawing up the
24 h on four PC’s, the project assignment which has the min- assessment criteria we have to bear these two concepts in mind
imum number of unassigned student groups is thus obtained. including the grading assessment profile [7].
For the remaining unassigned student groups, a second-round Instead of giving actual marks, a grading category index
list containing all the remaining projects is mailed to them. (GCI) from 1 to 8 is used for each assessment criterion. The
Allocation is again made on the basis of the second-round definition of each grading category [7] is given in Table III.
preferences of the student groups and the same allocation The rationale for converting to grading category is summarized
process is repeated. Usually in the second-round processing, as follows.
all the students will be allocated a project of their choice. 1) Make Marking More Valid by Adding More Assessment
Each allocation cycle takes approximately 1 min and it Criteria: Using a GCI makes it easier for the staff to grade as
is interesting to note that the minimum unassigned number the decision range for each criterion drops from 100 to 8. This
TEO AND HO: IMPLEMENTATION OF FINAL YEAR PROJECT IN ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING UNDERGRADUATE COURSE 27

TABLE III
GRADING CATEGORY AND DEFINITION

TABLE IV TABLE V
THE FIVE ASSESSMENT COMPONENTS FIVE CRITERIA FOR S1

identical criteria which are listed in Table VIII. Each of the

allows the FYP committee to add more criteria thus increasing criteria is explicitly spelled out either on the same page, as
the validity of the overall assessment. shown in Table VIII, or on the back page of each assessment
2) Scanning of Marks by an Optical Reader: Previously, form. This helps to ensure some consistency in the marking
the various components of the FYP marks had been as the assessors are not left to guess what factors to consider
handwritten by the lecturers and submitted to the FYP for each criterion.
committee. Two of the committee members had to manually IV. AUTOMATED PROCESSING OF MARKS
enter all the marks into a program. A large amount of time
The total marks of each student are calculated based on the
was also spent on sorting the marks prior to entering. The two
five assessment forms, namely, and marked by
staff members usually took at least four days to complete the
the supervisor, and and marked by the moderator.
job. To achieve a faster turnaround time, it was proposed that
In each assessment form, the project supervisor/moderator
the marks be submitted in optically readable forms. Thus not
shades an appropriate grading category from 1 to 8 for each
only the time taken for mark entry is shorter, all the possible
assessment criterion. Although fuzzy set theory and logic can
errors associated with the manual entry process are eliminated.
be applied [8] to convert GCI to marks, we believe that a
3) Minimize Inflation in Marks: Past data and practices
linear conversion from GCI to marks will be more reliable
have indicated that lecturers tend to anticipate a downward
and persuasive at the initial stage. The formulas to calculate
adjustment of the final mark by the FYP committee and thus
the marks for each assessment form, and for the total marks
factor that into the raw marks. These led to a bias in the
are listed as follows:
marking process and resulted in a higher mean every year. By
using grading category, it is more difficult for the lecturer to of GCI in
adjust the raw marks. As the lecturer gives a GCI for each of GCI in
assessment criterion for each student, the marking standard of GCI in
can thus be easily audited if required.
of GCI in
In the streamlined assessment system, the performance of
each student in the FYP is assessed using five main compo- of GCI in
nents, namely, by the supervisor and of GCI in
by the moderator. The description and the weightage of each
component are shown in Table IV. The five criteria for
Total Marks
and the 15 criteria for are listed in Tables V and VI and
the eight criteria for in Table VII. and have three
28 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EDUCATION, VOL. 41, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 1998

S2 M1
TABLE VI TABLE VII
FIFTEEN CRITERIA FOR EIGHT CRITERIA FOR

in dBase was also developed to enhance the management

of the FYP. The supporting system has basically three sets
of database files, namely, project.dbf, lecturer.dbf, and stu-
dent.dbf. The project file contains the project number, the
project title, the names of the two students and their ID’s, the
names of the supervisor, and the name of the moderator. The
lecturer file contains the name of the lecturer, the total number
of the supervised projects, each supervised project number,
the total number of the moderated projects, each moderated
project number, and the average and maximum marks given
by the lecturer in the preceding three years. The student file
contains the name of the student, the student’s ID, project
Each assessment form contains the student’s ID, the stu- number, GCI for each criterion in each assessment form,
dent’s name, the supervisor/moderator’s name, the project marks for and total marks given by the
number, the relevant assessment criteria, and the index marked supervisor, total marks given by the moderator, as well as the
by the supervisor/ moderator for each grading category against overall marks and ranking sorted by the overall marks. About
each assessment criterion. These forms are scanned by an ten programs were written in dBase to support the following
optical reader and the marks for each assessment form and functions and activities.
the total marks of each student are calculated by a computer 1) Printing of Individual Assessment Form: The five as-
program FypMark written in Turbo Pascal. sessment forms have to be printed one by one for each
For each assessment, in addition to calculating the individual students at different times of the year. In addition to the
student’s marks, FypMark also calculates the mean and the pre-printed common assessment criteria, each assessment
standard deviation of the marks for all the students. If either form has to contain individual data such as the name of
the mean or the standard deviation is not satisfactory, three sys- the student, the student’s ID, the project number, the name
tematic and fair mechanisms are provided for the adjustment of the supervisor/moderator, and the project title. We have
of marks to meet the required overall mean and/or standard to extract the required data from the database and use mail
deviation. merge to print every individual form.
In the previous years, using the old method, it was found 2) On-Line Inquiry: On-line inquiry for project number,
that the mean was always higher than 75 marks and the project supervisor, moderator, number of project supervised or
standard deviation was smaller than 5. By using the new moderated by a particular lecturer, etc., are always required.
proposed method, a much lower mean of 71.6 marks and a Especially at the end of the semester, there are many inquiries
rather high standard deviation of 9.3 are obtained as shown in such as the breakdown of marks of a particular student,
Table IX. We can see that the new method appears to be more identification of students who have very high or very low
discriminatory and thus gives a better linkage of marks to the marks, checking as to why a particular student’s marks are
actual student’s performance. too low or too high, etc.
3) Indication of Staff Work Load and Assignment of Moder-
V. MANAGEMENT SUPPORTING SYSTEM ator: Not all the staff members supervise the same number of
In addition to the program AssignProj for project allocation projects and thus the uneven work load on project supervision
and FypMark for calculation of marks, a supporting system has to be monitored. To equalize the total work load on project
TEO AND HO: IMPLEMENTATION OF FINAL YEAR PROJECT IN ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING UNDERGRADUATE COURSE 29

M S3
TABLE VIII
THREE CRITERIA FOR 2 AND

TABLE IX standard by the staff will result in a more consistent marking

THE MEAN AND STANDARD DEVIATION OF THE FIVE ASSESSMENT FORMS standard in the long term.
VI. CONCLUSION
A systematic mechanism for the management of final year
project including project allocation, streamlined assessment
using grading category, and the automated processing of marks
is described. This proposed system was initiated in June 1995
and various mechanisms and programs were developed as
and when required during the academic year 1995/1996. We
have now successfully implemented one complete cycle of
operation. In the second cycle of operation, the focus will be
on modification and fine-tuning.
supervision and moderation, the system calculates the number
The allocation algorithm not only minimizes the number
of projects to be moderated by each staff member. The system
of unassigned student groups but also allocates as many
will then make the appropriate assignment of moderators for
projects as possible in meeting the students’ preferences. As
all the projects based on the staff’s preference, the area of
the allocation is done in a fair manner, almost all the stu-
expertise, and the required number of projects to moderate.
dents accepted the project assigned to them. The streamlined
4) Lecturer’s Marking Statistic and Trend: In contrast to a
assessment criteria using grading category and the automated
written examination in which a question is marked by the processing of marks make the marking more discriminatory
same staff member, each final year project is marked by a and the standard more uniform among the large number of
different lecturer. Thus it is difficult to maintain a uniform students and supervisors. It is hoped that some of our ap-
marking standard for all the students. For the same student on proaches can be selectively adopted for undergraduate course
the same assessment criterion, a staff member may indicate work on continuous assessment even for a smaller student
as very good while another staff member may indicate as just population.
adequate. The supporting system thus keeps a record of the
average marks and the maximum marks given in the preceding
three years by each individual staff member. It will report those REFERENCES
staff members who have consistently given excessively high [1] S. Lekhakul and R. A. Higgins, “Senior design project: Undergraduate
marks or extremely low marks for all projects. This quality thesis,” IEEE Trans. Educ., vol. 37, pp. 203–206, May 1994.
[2] Vaezi-Nejad, “Final year project as an important component of the
control is important to maintain integrity of the whole system. electrical and electronic engineering degree course at the university of
5) Discrepancy Between Supervisor and Moderator: Greenwich,” Int. J. Elec. Eng. Educ., vol. 30, pp. 296–302, 1993.
Another approach to maintain a uniform marking standard [3] J. Balla and P. Boyle, “Assessment of student performance: A frame-
work for improving practice,” Assess. and Eval. in Higher Educ., vol.
is by comparing the marks given by the supervisor and 19, no. 1, pp. 17–28, 1994.
the moderator. For the same student, most of the marks [4] D. Frith and H. Macintosh, A Teacher’s Guide to Assessment. Chel-
given by the supervisor and the moderator are rather close, tenham, U.K.: Stanley Thrones, 1984.
[5] Y. Bennett, “The validity and reliability of assessments and self-
however, for some students, the mark difference from the two assessments of work-based learning,” Assess. and Eval. in Higher Educ.,
assessors are very high. The supporting system checks student vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 83–94, 1993.
[6] S. Brown. and P. Knight, Assessing Learning in Higher Education.
by student the difference in marks given by the two assessors London, U.K.: Kogan Page, 1994.
and groups them under different classes. The system highlights [7] G. Carter et al., “Assessment of undergraduate electrical engineering
the supervisors and moderators who have been giving marks laboratory studies,” Proc. Inst. Elec. Eng., vol. 2A, no. 7, pp. 460–474,
1970.
in either extreme. Mediation can be arranged to resolve the [8] J. R. Echauz and G. J. Vachtsevanos, “Fuzzy grading system,” IEEE
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30 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EDUCATION, VOL. 41, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 1998

C. Y. Teo received the B.Sc. (Eng.) degree in electrical engineering from D. J. Ho received the B.Eng. (Electrical) degree from the University of
National Taiwan University in 1971 and the M.Sc. degree in electrical Singapore (now known as the National University of Singapore) in 1980 and
machines and power systems from the University of London, London, U.K., the M.S.E.E. degree from the State University of New York, Stony Brook,
in 1974. in 1985. She also received the Postgraduate Diploma of Teaching in Higher
He worked in many areas of computer applications in power systems since Education from the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological
he joined the Imperial College, University of London, as a Research Assistant University, Singapore, in 1995.
in 1973. Subsequently he served as Engineer, Executive Engineer, Senior She worked in IC product engineering before joining the School of
Engineer, and Project Manager in the Public Utilities Board, Singapore, from Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, in
1974 to 1981. With the Nanyang Technological University for 17 years, he 1983, where she is currently a Senior Lecturer. She teaches Digital Logic
served as Head of Division of Electrical Engineering for 6 years. He was Testing in the final year, Design and Electronic courses. Her areas of interest
Chairman of the IEE Singapore Centre from 1993 to 1995 and is currently an include ASIC design, speech coding, DSP applications, and engineering
Associate Professor. He is the author of three books on Pascal programming education.
and of the popular book on Low Voltage Systems. He is also the developer
of a number of PC-based integrated simulators for design and teaching of
power system.
Prof. Teo is a Fellow of the IEE, U.K.