ACADEMIA Letters

Assessment and Evaluation of Course Outcomes of

Engineering Electromagnetics Course addressing
Associated Complex Engineering Problems and
Knowledge Profiles
Muhibul Haque Bhuyan, Southeast University

At present, engineering education is becoming more challenging due to the ever-increasing

pressure from the industrial demands on graduates’ skills and attributes. The engineering
program educators are trying on several methods so that these newly demanded skill-gaps
can be met through various activities and engagements of the students in several engineer-
ing courses. They try to develop the basic knowledge of the students, make sure that they
have clear concepts of what is to be learned from a particular course, and design complex en-
gineering problems to develop their complex problem-solving skills by performing complex
engineering activities during their undergraduate engineering studies.
However, most of the engineering course faculty members are in trouble identifying the
complex engineering problems and assessing and evaluate their students’ learning outcomes
accordingly. Usually, there are around 18-20 theory courses and 10-15 laboratory courses in
the core course group of an engineering curriculum for the undergraduate students. While
assessing and evaluating the course and hence the program outcomes, the faculty members or
the program leaders usually choose 7-10 theory and 5-7 laboratory courses from these core
course groups. Engineering Electromagnetics is such a core theory course in the undergrad-
uate Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE) program.
In this work, a performance indicator-based assessment and evaluation method has been
proposed to compute the attainment levels of some program outcomes (POs) of the BSc in
EEE program under the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Southeast

Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Muhibul Haque Bhuyan, muhibulhb@gmail.com

Citation: Bhuyan, M.H. (2021). Assessment and Evaluation of Course Outcomes of Engineering
Electromagnetics Course addressing Associated Complex Engineering Problems and Knowledge Profiles.
Academia Letters, Article 3216. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL3216.
1
University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. The program uses all the twelve program outcomes stated in
the manual of the Board of Accreditation for Engineering and Technical Education (BAETE),
which is the only engineering program accreditation body in Bangladesh. Since this body is
a provisional member of the Washington Accord (WA) under the International Engineering
Alliance (IEA) since 2016 and wants to be a full signatory very soon, therefore, as per WA rec-
ommendation, it follows the Outcome-Based Education (OBE) approach for program accred-
itation since 1st July 2017. As such, all engineering academic programs under tertiary-level
educational institutions seeking accreditation from BAETE have switched from traditional
input-based curriculum to the outcome-based curriculum (OBC). Therefore, their assessment
schemes have become outcome-based assessments (OBA). But to assess the POs, a program
may assess it from course outcomes directly or using several performance indicators (PIs).
There are many models to assess the POs, such as the accumulated model where all courses
of the curriculum contribute to the PO measurements; the dominating model in which a se-
lected number of courses contributes to the PO measurements, normally accounted in several
core courses of the curriculum; and the culmination model that uses a few selected courses,
usually between 3-5 courses for contributing to the PO measurements, and normally conducted
during the final year of study. To assess the POs from different courses using PIs, BSc in EEE
program selected 10 core theory, 5 core laboratory, 1 general education, and three capstone
design project courses with a total of 44 credits. Engineering Electromagnetics course is such
a core course. The course contents of this course are given as follows:

Static electric field: Postulates of electrostatics. Coulomb’s law for discrete and
continuously distributed charges. Gauss’s law and its applications. Electric po-
tential due to charge distribution., conductors and dielectric in a static electric
field, flux density -boundary conditions; capacitance - electrostatic energy and
forces, energy in terms of field equations, capacitance calculation of different ge-
ometries; boundary value problems - Poisson’s and Laplace’s equations in differ-
ent co-ordinate systems. Steady electric current: Ohm’s law. continuity equation.
Joule’s law, resistance calculation. Static Magnetic field: Postulates of magne-
tostatics. Biot-Savart’s law. Ampere’s law and applications, vector magnetic po-
tential, magnetic dipole, magnetization, magnetic field intensity, and relative per-
meability, boundary conditions for a magnetic field. magnetic energy, magnetic
forces, torque, and inductance of different geometries. Time-varying fields and
Maxwell’s equations: Faraday’s law of electromagnetic induction. Maxwell’s
equations - differential and integral forms, boundary conditions, potential func-
tions; time-harmonic fields, and Poynting theorem. Plane electromagnetic wave:
plane wave in lossless media. Doppler effect, a transverse electromagnetic wave.

Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Muhibul Haque Bhuyan, muhibulhb@gmail.com

Citation: Bhuyan, M.H. (2021). Assessment and Evaluation of Course Outcomes of Engineering
Electromagnetics Course addressing Associated Complex Engineering Problems and Knowledge Profiles.
Academia Letters, Article 3216. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL3216.
2
 polarization of plane wave; plane wave in lossy media, low-loss dielectrics. good
conductors; group velocity, instantaneous and average power densities, the nor-
mal and oblique incidence of plane waves at plane boundaries for different po-
larization.

The objectives of the course are set as follows:

1. To teach the basics of electromagnetism

2. To explain the static electric and magnetic fields and their medium

3. To explain electromagnetic induction due to time-varying field

4. To derive Maxwell’s and Poisson’s equations and Poynting’s theorem

5. To analyze the plane wave propagation in lossy and lossless media

6. To show how to solve various electromagnetic problems

For this course, three course outcomes (COs) have been prepared and mapped to the ap-
propriate Bloom’s taxonomy domain and level (BTDL), 3 program outcomes (POs) as well
as associated knowledge profiles (WKs) and complex engineering problems (CPs) as given in
Table 1.

Table 1: Course outcome mapped to four different program outcomes of BSc in EEE program

Then the course assessment and evaluation methods based on performance indicators were
developed through various complex engineering problems. For this purpose, a few perfor-
mance assessment rubrics were prepared, and thus CO and PO attainment data were gath-
ered and then evaluated through various statistical analyses and are reported for a registered
student cohort of Engineering Electromagnetic course in Spring 2021 Semester at the EEE
Department of Southeast University. Evaluation reports revealed that the aimed yardstick was
attained by that student cohort. Finally, a few recommendations were made for further quality
improvement of this course.

Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Muhibul Haque Bhuyan, muhibulhb@gmail.com

Citation: Bhuyan, M.H. (2021). Assessment and Evaluation of Course Outcomes of Engineering
Electromagnetics Course addressing Associated Complex Engineering Problems and Knowledge Profiles.
Academia Letters, Article 3216. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL3216.
3
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Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Muhibul Haque Bhuyan, muhibulhb@gmail.com

Citation: Bhuyan, M.H. (2021). Assessment and Evaluation of Course Outcomes of Engineering
Electromagnetics Course addressing Associated Complex Engineering Problems and Knowledge Profiles.
Academia Letters, Article 3216. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL3216.
4
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Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Muhibul Haque Bhuyan, muhibulhb@gmail.com

Citation: Bhuyan, M.H. (2021). Assessment and Evaluation of Course Outcomes of Engineering
Electromagnetics Course addressing Associated Complex Engineering Problems and Knowledge Profiles.
Academia Letters, Article 3216. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL3216.
5