Students’ attitudes towards group based project exams in two engineering programmes

At Aalborg University, engineering students work in groups on PBL projects. The assessment of these projects is through group exams except between 2007 and 2013 when the law forbade group exams. Prior to 2007, research showed that students preferred the group exams and a new study was made after the 2013 reintroduction of group exams. Again the result is that students prefer the group exam, but there are significant differences between students from various engineering programmes. We compare the programmes Architecture and Design with Software engineering, the latter being the most positive towards the group exam. A further result is that one third of the students testified that facing a new type of exam than previous did not affect their behaviour at all. This might suggest that the “backwash” effect of exam on student behaviour is not as present in these students as often expected and argued in education research.