Including peer and self-assessment in a continuous assessment scheme in electrical and electronics engineering courses

During the last decades, different assessment approaches have been implemented in many higher education institutions in order to complement or even substitute the final exams. Here, an analysis of the implementation of a mixed assessment method (continuous assessment plus a final exam) in a Signals and Systems course is presented. The continuous assessment part includes several assessed activities and ways to assess a given activity: peer assessed homework, automatically assessed online tests, instructor assessed laboratory practices and self-assessed classroom written exercises. A voluntary survey that includes items about the course contents, about the weights assigned to each activity and about the influence of the assessment type in their achievement of the course goals is delivered at the end of semester. There is a high correlation between the continuous assessment marks and final exam marks. Survey responses show that the objectives of the course can be reasonably achieved, most of the students were in agreement with the weights assigned to each assessed activity, most of the students considered that conducting peer assessment was helpful for them, and most of the students considered that their self-assessment was more useful than being instructor assessed.