Partitioned recording of test and homework scores as a practical means of preserving useful data for assessment

Recording only the total scores for work by each student destroys potentially useful and detailed information about students´ relative performance on different problem types and subjects. With contemporary software, it has become practical to record and collect scores on homework, tests and laboratory exercises to any level of desired detail and, from this recorded data, to compute, with only modest effort, measures of student performance for each topic listed on the course syllabus or according to measurable outcomes for educational objectives of the course. Because a teacher constructs the assessment workbooks in real time during the course, the workbook provides real-time feedback about student performance that the teacher can use to adapt the program of study during the term. This paper describes assessment spreadsheet workbooks developed for three different electrical and computer engineering courses at Mississippi State University.