This complete evidence-based practice paper will describe our successful grading and assessment practices of a large freshmen engineering course. In the Fall of 2016 we taught "Introduction to Engineering", a course designed to help students transition from high school to college and learn strategies to help them become successful engineering students. Over 70% of the students had not yet declared an engineering major but had intentions to transfer to an engineering major the following spring semester. This was a 1-credit hour, online and in-person hybrid class, technologically managed by a Learning Management Software (LMS). Over 700 students enrolled in the course, and our instructional team consisted of one Instructor, one graduate TA, and two undergraduate TAs. This paper reports evidence-based practice of two assessment methods, Divide-and-Conquer and Grade-a-lhons, that we used to successfully evaluate a large-enrollment course with small grading staff. The coursework was divided into two types of assignments: weekly homework and a final report. The design of the course was based on content that had been previously implemented at this large, midwestern institution, as well as best practices learned from introduction to engineering courses at other institutions. In particular, the final project was based on Ray Landis' work (Landis 2013). The weekly assignments were 1-page essay assignments. We asked students to reflect on the course's assigned in-person activities, reading, and videos and to create a personal plan that would set themselves up to becoming a successful engineering student. To the best of our understanding, this is the largest implementation of "Design Your Successful Engineering Path " that has been able to grade final reports at this scale.
展开▼