Assessing student preparedness for professional engineering practice: a professional advice task

One goal of engineering education is to prepare students for professional engineering practice. Assessing such preparedness can be difficult. At the Center for Engineering Learning and Teaching, we have been exploring the development of an authentic assessment task in Civil and Environmental Engineering-the professional advice task. We have been using this task to gain insight into students´ preparedness relative to ABET outcomes B (data analysis) and D (teamwork), as well as their preparedness more broadly (i.e., when they generate the list of issues, how broad are these issues). However, the format of the task is sufficiently generic that it could be used for almost any ABET outcome