Abstract

Learning is often quoted as a lifelong process. In other words, life is about learning. As prominent institutions, universities are concerned with valued and measurable learning among undergraduate students so that their mastery level of a particular content knowledge can be quantitatively gauged. Of many types of assessments, summative assessment plays a greater role in majority of engineering courses due to nature of the content knowledge. This paper mathematically investigates the fairness issue of equal weightage for all summative assessments i.e., assignments, mid-term test and end-term examination. A multiple objective optimization on the basis of ratio analysis (MOORA) is utilized to assign equal weight for the aforementioned assessments. It was found that the number of students failing the selected engineering course increases by about five times using the MOORA method. The finding clearly reveals the advantages of the former method (unequal weights) as compared to MOORA method in terms of catering students with different learning styles and speed of knowledge acquisition.