Students enrolled in software engineering degrees are generally required to undertake a research project in their final year through which they demonstrate the ability to conduct research, communicate outcomes, and build in-depth expertise in an area. Assessment in these projects typically involves evaluating the product of their research via a thesis or a similar artifact. However, this misses a range of other factors that go into producing successful software engineers and researchers. Incorporating aspects such as process, attitudes, project complexity, and supervision support into the assessment can provide a more holistic evaluation of the performance likely to better align with the intended learning outcomes. In this paper, we present on our experience of adopting an innovative assessment approach to enhance learning outcomes and research performance in our software engineering research projects. Our approach adopted a task-oriented approach to portfolio assessment that incorporates student personas, frequent formative feedback, delayed summative grading, and standards-aligned outcomes-based assessment. We report upon our continuous improvement journey in adapting tasks and criteria to address the challenges of assessing student research projects. Our lessons learnt demonstrate the value of personas to guide the development of holistic rubrics, giving meaning to grades and focusing staff and student attention on attitudes and skills rather than a product only.

翻译：攻读软件工程学位的学生通常需要在最后一学年开展一个研究项目，通过该项目展示其进行研究、交流成果以及在某一领域建立深入专业知识的能力。此类项目的评估通常涉及通过论文或类似成果来评价其研究产物。然而，这忽略了培养成功软件工程师和研究人员所涉及的诸多其他因素。将过程、态度、项目复杂度和导师支持等方面纳入评估，可以提供更全面的表现评价，从而更好地与预期学习成果保持一致。本文介绍了我们在软件工程研究项目中采用创新评估方法以提升学习成果和研究绩效的经验。我们的方法采用了一种面向任务的档案袋评估方式，结合了学生角色画像、频繁的形成性反馈、延迟的总结性评分以及基于标准的结果导向评估。我们报告了在调整任务和标准以应对学生研究项目评估挑战方面的持续改进历程。所获经验证明了角色画像在指导制定整体评分标准方面的价值，这种评分标准赋予了分数意义，并将员工和学生的注意力聚焦于态度和技能，而不仅仅是产物。