Universiti Malaysia Pahang, Malaysia INTRODUCING PRIORITIES IN PLANT DESIGN PROJECT ASSESSMENT RUBRIC USING AHP Mohamad Rizza Othman, Ramesh Kanthasamy, Mohd Yusri Mohd Yunus & Wan Hanisah Wan Ibrahim Process Systems & Env. Eng. Group, Faculty of Chemical & Natural Resources Engineering Universiti Malaysia Pahang, Malaysia Introduction Fig. 3 Assessment rubric priority comparison 1 AHP approach Typical approach Rubric is an important non standardized assessment tool to measure students’ effort in achieving the learning outcomes of a course. Usually rubrics works by giving score for a specific criteria based on a pre defined rating scale. The score is done by using deductive logic with assumptions and carefully deducing an outcome from them. The current scoring rubric however, does not include priority among the criteria. Each criteria are either weighted equally or weights are given based on assumptions without a proper pairwise comparison. In reality, imperative among the assessment criteria is inevitable. Thus, introducing priorities could elucidate a more accurate and justified conclusions. Results and Discussion 4 Assessment approach 2 Fig. 4 Total marks distribution for each attributes by evaluator 1 (E1) In this course, students will carry out a plant design project to demonstrate the practical aspects in designing Chemical/ Bio/ Gas processing plant. The students will be divided into groups where they are expected to design a Chemical/ Biological/ Gas processing plant. Students will be assessed based on their presentations, reports, log book and attitude wise. Plant Design course synopsis Table 1. Plant design presentation assessment rubric using typical scoring Item assessed Score A1 Introduction - process background, market survey, site location, processing screening, novelty of proposed design 5 A2 Process Synthesis A3 Computer Simulation (mass & energy balance) 10 A4 Utilities A5 Equipment Sizing A6 Waste Treatment -    types of wastes, potential hazards & treatment procedures A7 Process Control & Safety Studies –   control approaches, P&ID & HAZOP study on major equipment 15 A8 Economic Analysis - Equipment cost, total capital costs, production & operating costs; Profitability analysis & payback period A9 Visual presentation A10 Length of Presentation Interesting findings:- Marks for A3, A7, and A8 is somewhat acceptable as according to the judgment produced by AHP. Marks for A1, A5, A6, A9 and A10 shows major imbalance of weights. The AHP system has suggested that the proportion marks for the three particular assessment i.e. A2, A4 and A5 should be raised from the former evaluation which actually identified to be the core of the course. This particular observation recommends that the initial marks intensity is gravely insufficient, particularly which reflects that the typical evaluation system is suffering from improper marking weight specification during the design stage. This happened as a result of failure in critically taking into consideration the implication of one element to the others comprehensively. Scoring approach using AHP 3 AHP is a multicriteria decision making (MCDM) methodology that performs decision trade off between multiple objectives in a hierarchically structure. Conclusions 5 Fig. 1 AHP using Super Decisions software. Fig. 2 AHP weights scaling. This study has proposed adopting the AHP technique to further enhance the typical PD evaluation practiced in UMP. The results demonstrated that the new approach has significantly improved the assessment judgment, by properly segregating the proportion of the markings which correspond to the order of priorities. This basically means that the new system has successfully enhance the fairness of specifying the marks which eventually give rise to proper grading evaluation on the students that truly reflects their deserving progression status. PSEEG Process Systems & Env. Eng. Group | FKKSA | UMP E-mail : rizza@ump.edu.my | Website : http://psegfkksa.ump.edu.my/