An e-assessment for engineering drawing

An effective method by which students learn the fundamentals of drawing practice is hand drawing part and general assembly engineering drawings. These drawings are then marked to assess the students’ knowledge and understanding. However, when the student cohort size increases up to several hundreds, the time taken to mark the detail within a portfolio of drawings becomes significant too. Simply reducing the number of drawings would deprive students of learning how to draw a wider range of components and assemblies, so does not represent an ideal solution. This paper discusses how an online assessment is used in conjunction with existing hand drawings to reduce the time taken to mark coursework. The online test comprises five different question types, such as, matching pairs, multiple-choice, and numerical, which are used to mark different aspects of drawing practice. The paper describes why these question types are used and how they can test for specific knowledge and understanding, which then need not be reassessed in the portfolio of hand drawings. Also discussed, is the importance of the portfolio of engineering drawings as an effective means for developing students’ technical drawing skills.