1. Introduction

The Ministry of Education of Ethiopia has announced the implementation of exit exam for all undergraduate program students (public and private), beginning with the 2022/2023 academic year, in order to improve the quality of graduates produced by higher learning institutions. The exit exam aimed at checking whether students have acquired the required knowledge, skills and attitudes or not. To implement this, it requires determining competency areas for a specific program, which is already completed. Based on the competency areas prepared, it needs to plan the construction of tests.

The BSc curriculum in Water Supply and Environmental Engineering was designed in such a way that the students’ knowledge, skill, and attitude are evaluated at the course level. But such an assessment method needs mapping with program learning outcomes to assess the overall competence of the graduates. Therefore, additional techniques which can directly measure students’ achievement of program learning outcomes have to be established. In this regard, the most accepted and vital assessment tool that directly measures student achievement of program learning outcomes is program curriculum competencies-based exit exams.

Generally, test blueprint will help to ensure tests: 1) Appropriately assess the achievement of instructional objectives of the course; 2) Appropriately reflect key course goals, objectives and the material learned or covered during the instruction period; and 3) Include the appropriate item formats along with the knowledge and skills being assessed.

Keeping this in mind, the team has prepared this test blueprint document in order to help the test developers or content specialists in their process of valid and reliable test construction. The major points considered in the process of preparing this test blue print were the core competencies that have been already identified for the themes of courses, the course contents, course credit hours, and the learning outcomes with their corresponding levels of achievement by learning domains. In line with these, the number of test items that should adequately assess the performance of students in all the content topics will be determined through discussion with the content specialists who construct the blueprint and test for their corresponding study program.

Therefore, the aim of this document is to prepare clear test blueprint of the exit exam which helps test constructors to match various competencies with the course content and the appropriate modality of assessment that should be able to measure student performance in all dimensions of knowledge, skill and attitude.

2. Objective of Exit Exam blueprint

Exit exam blueprint preparation is generally opted to assist the preparation of a test that is representative, broadly sampled, and consisting of complete knowledge domain expected of the Ethiopian higher education students on completion of their study program. The specific objectives of test blueprint are to:

Facilitate the construction of a representative and balanced test items for the selected courses in accordance with the competencies identified.
Guide test developers or writers to write or set appropriate test items.

3. Expected profile of the Graduates

This program is aimed at training manpower required for solving of the country‘s critical water supply, sanitation and Environmental problems which are emerging in the current scenario. Well-qualified Water Supply and Environmental Engineers will be produced through this program who can actively be engaged in the study, planning; design; development and management of Water Supply and Environmental Engineering projects in general. Specifically, the trainees will be equipped with the knowledge that enables them to execute the following tasks:

Undertake project identification, pre-feasibility, and feasibility studies of water supply and environmental engineering projects.
Plan the design of water supply systems, sanitary landfills, sanitation infrastructures, and structures that are related to environmental protection works;
Create new water and wastewater treatment facilities and model treatment plants as per the acquired knowledge.
Prepare complete contract documents for water supply and environmental projects like sanitation projects, water supply projects, EIA projects, and projects that are related to environmental protection works like wastewater and solid waste management;
Plan, design, manage, monitor, and evaluate the operation and maintenance of water supply systems, wastewater treatment projects, environmental engineering projects, and solid waste management projects, as well as the environmental impact assessment for the projects.
Remodeling and rehabilitation of existing water supply, wastewater treatment, and solid waste management systems.
Work and communicate effectively with others on multi-disciplinary teams to develop practical, technically sound, cost-effective solutions to complex and diverse environmental engineering problems;

4. General objective the program exit exam

The water supply and Environmental Engineering exit exam would have started with the following objectives:

To evaluate students whether students are able to plan, design, implement and manage water supply and environmental engineering projects to urban and rural areas;
To assess the level of understanding and skill of the core competences in the areas of water supply, water quality, water and wastewater treatment, water technology development and environmental engineering problems solving

5. Specific objectives of exit exam

To evaluate the students whether they excelled with their specialized department or not
Ensuring the students to be competent with other university/country students with the same field of specialization.
To make sure that the students would have exactly meets the need of skill, competence and creative mind for the companies.
Improving public trust and confidence in WSEE professionals
Creating competitive spirit among the same faculties/departments in Ethiopia with the competes to encouraging them to give due attention to the national standards
To make available skilled and competent manpower for national and international market and industries.

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