Assessing a statistics capstone course against a university’s graduate profile attributes framework

Abstract

Compulsory capstone courses were introduced in 2019 for all undergraduates in the Faculty of Science in recognition that students required support to transition from being a student of a discipline to a practitioner. These capstone courses required the University of Auckland graduate profile attributes to be assessed. This research aimed to discover how a generic institutional framework could be used and if it provided insights into the statistics discipline. Coursework submitted by two cohorts of students enrolled in the statistics capstone course were examined. This paper demonstrates that the use of a generic framework provided a new lens on statistics capstone course assessment and prompted an awareness of the skills and knowledge needed to improve the transition from university.