Innovations in the civil engineering education: A capstone case study in a Malaysian University

Capstone course is a Civil Engineering Design subject attended by final year Civil Engineering undergraduates. It was introduced in the Civil Engineering curriculum to fulfil the requirement for engineering education by Washington Accord. It aims to strengthen the co-curriculum for the engineering degree program. The course captures and applies all the fundamentals of civil engineering knowledge. This paper presents the outcomes of the innovations and assessments introduced by Capstone. The assessment and analysis are based on the performance of five batches of Capstone students from 2011 to 2012. The innovations include a comprehensive test introduced to the second batch, mimicking the practice of Engineers in Training (EIT) in the United States. The findings generally indicate that this type of comprehensive assessment could positively impact the graduating students. Other findings include the improvement and significant impacts on the overall performance from one batch to another after variations of the assessment components were introduced and continual quality improvements (CQI) were implemented from one batch to the next. This is indeed an exciting development in engineering education as Capstone is not a familiar feature for engineering education in Malaysian universities, definitely not in this comprehensive scale of implementation.