Ask students to create assessments for industry insight

<p dir="ltr">In engineering education, staying aligned with real-world industry practice is a persistent challenge. The authors suggest a novel approach: invite senior students, fresh from integrated work-study placements, to collaborate with faculty in designing authentic assessments for junior peers. These senior students bring direct workplace insights and recent student perspectives, enabling them to craft problem-based tasks grounded in realistic engineering scenarios, ones with no single correct answer, requiring research and critical thinking. The experience benefitted the juniors through heightened engagement, improved transfer of learning across modules and contexts, and increased confidence in tackling complex tasks. Concurrently, the senior students themselves deepened their technical understanding, practiced mentoring and communication, and gained ownership of the teaching-learning process. The authors conclude that student-as-partners (SAPs) assessment design holds promise as a complementary tool to traditional faculty- or industry-designed assessments, particularly for exposing students very early to the evolving industry work and demands.</p>