Campbell University: Advancing Professional Skills Assessment in Engineering Education

Campbell University: Advancing Professional Skills Assessment in Engineering Education

As Campbell University continues to grow its School of Engineering, faculty are focused on ensuring students graduate with not only strong technical foundations, but also the professional skills required for modern engineering practice. Campbell piloted Acuity Insights’ Professional Skills Development (PSD) assessment with first-year engineering students to explore whether a structured, scalable tool could meaningfully measure competencies such as ethical reasoning, communication, and professional judgment. The pilot was conducted with approximately 40 students and replaced an existing assignment, allowing the program to evaluate PSD in a real instructional setting without adding additional burden to faculty or students.

Challenge

Measuring and scaling assessment of professional skills while maintaining alignment with accreditation expectations.

Solution

Professional Skills Development (PSD)

Results

Critical insights into student readiness, revealing emerging strengths and professional skill gaps that traditional coursework often misses.

PROGRAM TYPE

Undergraduate Engineering Education

PROGRAM SIZE

~150 total engineering students; ~40 students in pilot cohort

REGION

North America – USA

Challenge

Despite a strong institutional emphasis on professional development, Campbell’s engineering program faced several persistent challenges common across engineering education:

Making “soft skills” measurable at scale: While the program performs well in professional skills development relative to peer institutions, competencies such as ethics, communication, and judgment remain difficult to evaluate consistently and objectively.
Limited faculty training in ethics and professional judgment: Faculty often come from highly technical backgrounds and may not have formal training in teaching or assessing ethical reasoning.
Balancing assessment quality with instructional efficiency: Traditional approaches rely heavily on observation or assignment-based evaluation, which becomes difficult to scale across larger cohorts and multiple course sections.
Avoiding fragmented assessment systems: As the program grows, ensuring consistent, defensible, and centralized measurement of student outcomes becomes increasingly important, especially in the context of accreditation expectations.

Solution

Campbell University piloted the Professional Skills Development (PSD) assessment as a lightweight, scalable way to evaluate professional competencies within an existing course structure by:

Replacing legacy assignments with structured assessment

The PSD tool was implemented as a direct replacement for an existing assignment, minimizing disruption while enabling comparison to prior approaches.

Low-friction implementation within a live course

Students completed the assessment over one week in three short (20-minute) sessions, allowing integration without significant curriculum redesign or administrative overhead.

Structured measurement of professional competencies

The assessment provided standardized scenarios designed to evaluate reasoning in ethics, communication, and broader professional judgment—areas traditionally difficult to quantify.

“The strongest aspects are the low implementation friction, scalability, and psychometric foundation.”

Lee Rynearson, Associate Professor and First-Year Engineering Coordinator, Campbell University

Results

The pilot provided Campbell University with meaningful insight into both student learning and the challenges of assessing professional skills at scale.

Surface-level engagement with deeper cognitive insight: Students found the assessment engaging and thought-provoking, particularly when confronted with ambiguous scenarios that did not have obvious answers.
Evidence of overconfidence in early-stage learners: Results suggested a potential plateau in perceived professional skill development, indicating that students may overestimate their competency early in their academic journey.
Validation of existing faculty observations: The PSD results aligned with anecdotal faculty impressions regarding student readiness and professional judgment development, providing a more structured layer of evidence.
Identification of skills gaps in traditional coursework: The pilot surfaced insights that would be difficult to capture through standard assignments or instructor observation alone.

How PSD Supports Academic Leaders

Across many pilots with a variety of leading institutions, PSD has shown that it delivers value differently depending on institutional needs and the role of the academic leader:

Institutional / Accreditation Leaders: For programs managing ABET requirements, PSD provides structured, defensible evidence of student competency development. It reduces reliance on subjective or fragmented evaluation methods and supports more consistent reporting across cohorts.
Program Advocates / Change-Makers: Faculty and administrators seeking to improve or defend curriculum design can use PSD data as evidence for program effectiveness, especially in areas like ethics education and professional formation.
Research-Oriented Users: For faculty engaged in educational research or grant funding, PSD offers standardized, psychometrically grounded data that can support National Science Foundation proposals and outcomes-based research on engineering education.
Development-Focused Educators: Educators focused on student growth can use PSD outputs to encourage reflection and identify gaps in student self-awareness—particularly where students overestimate their own competency levels.

The PSD pilot at Campbell University demonstrated the potential for scalable, structured assessment to enhance visibility into professional skill development in engineering education and reinforced several key learnings:

Professional skills require more structured and defensible measurement systems
Students benefit from reflective, scenario-based assessment even when it challenges confidence
Scalable tools are increasingly important as engineering programs expand
Implementation simplicity is critical, but must align with institutional priorities