Impact of Mandating The Research Article Based Evaluation as an Assessment for The Pre-final Year Students for Effective Execution of Final Year Project

A Literature survey plays a vital role in preparing the students to carry out research-oriented projects in the final year. The influence of equipping the students with a quality reading of research articles before entering their project semester has not received much attention so far. The present study explores this aspect by introducing students to analyze published research articles as a part of internal assessment in the pre-final year. One batch of Students from B.Tech (Food Technology) was given prior practice for literature reading by mandating it as one of the internal assessment for the subject- Oils and Fats Processing technology, while the other class of students went through the conventional assessment system. The influence of adopting the research article based evaluation in the project outcome attainment was compared for both batches of students in the final year. Facilitating the prior literature reading practice helped students to formulate the project objectives more clearly, critically analyze the reported works of previous researchers, identify realistically the expected challenges in the progress of research, avoid repetition of already explored solutions and finally come up with meaning research outcomes within the stipulated time. The study indicates the need for adopting the research article based evaluation as one of the compulsory assessment for students to help gradually develop research aptitude, rather than expecting such skills to form quickly when they enter final year to take up the project. Insufficient time spent in analyzing literature articles (Natália Almeida et al, 2011) will end up in inefficient attainment of project outcomes.

A Literature review is the knowledge source to define project objectives, collect methodologies, identify research gap, and understand the scope of the project (Hannah Snyder, 2019).

Any successful project would have supported with detailed literature collection (Abdullah Ramdhani et al 2014), whereas, with the current education scenario & student mentality towards engineering education, they didn't have the required knowledge background, curiosity & patience to read enough literature to understand the technical findings explained in complex vocabulary to capture necessary inputs relevant to their project. It ends up in a deficient understanding of the project, lack of awareness about expected challenges in conducting experiments (Christoph Muller-Bloch, Johann Kranz (2015) as a result, completion of the project which is not valuable for student, institute as well the society.

As student start practice of reading the literature either in the previous semester or during the project semester, they didn't find sufficient time to overcome the knowledge gap required to understand the literature (Fawaz ali ahamed qaserm and Elrasheed ismail M.Zayid (2019) which end up in identifying not enough literature findings.