A diagnostic tool for competency-based program engineering

Competency based education (CBE) is seen by many as a way to optimize learning on cost, efficiency and flexibility. However, defining the required competencies, assigning them to specific courses and building the assessments evaluating student's proficiency can be tedious. More precisely, making sure that the assessments evaluate what they are supposed to evaluate requires a fair amount of psychometrics knowledge and time that can be difficult for teachers to acquire, maintain and use. Addressing assessment validity and more specifically competency frameworks mapping adequacy, we propose a rule-based tool to ease the building and the refinement of CBE courses and curricula. After introducing the context and briefly the related work, we present our set of rules before illustrating the capacity of the proposed diagnostic tool on an engineering curriculum. Experiments show that this tool can improve mapping adequacy in term of predictive accuracy and would require more efforts towards competency parameters reliability measurement.