Authentic Assessment Applied to Engineering and Business Undergraduate Consulting Teams

The rationale and structure of an authentic assessment strategy used in the multi-disciplinary industry project (MDIP) at Monash University over the last five years. The MDIP involves engineering, marketing, accounting and industrial design students nearing the end of their undergraduate programs working in multi-disciplinary product development teams of 8±10 members. The students work on real problems provided by participating industry partners. The authentic assessment strategy developed to evaluate individual student performance is based partly on group performance on both written and live presentations of their project reports as assessed by both industry partners and supervisors, and partly on the performance of each individual on a range of real-life skills as assessed by the supervisor, their peers and the students themselves. What makes the assessment `authentic' is that the problems provided by the industry partners are real and the skills that are assessed during the completion of the project are essential for participation in multidisciplinary project teams that operate in modern industrial settings.