There is great consciousness about the need to evaluate technical skills among the engineering courses at the University and many methodologies have been proposed for that. Also, some transversal competences like interpersonal skills, information and communication technology (ICT) literacy, and critical or innovative thinking have received important attention during the last decade, and numerous approaches have been proposed and analyzed for its evaluation. However, the capabilities of engineering students regarding some others transversal competencies remain largely unevaluated, even if they appear in the official syllabuses of the different courses within the bachelor’s or master’s degree. That could be the case of competences like students’ ability to apply their knowledge to their work in a professional manner or their skills to undertake further studies with a high degree of autonomy.

Within this work, we propose a methodology and evaluate its effectiveness for the evaluation of the aforementioned transversal competences among final-year engineering students. They are faced with an experience close to the reality of their future work as engineers. They must successfully evaluate whether a sample of rocket propellant can be safely stored for 10 years. For that, they shall be able to understand and apply industrial standards on the matter. Although the assessment is related to the course contents on solid propellant rocket engines, students are totally unaware of the procedures or materials that need to be used for the analysis. Furthermore, they shall interact with the laboratory staff in charge of using the high-end equipment required for the analysis (e.g. gas chromatograph). The professor in charge of the course only provides a minimal orientation about the aims of the activity and the theoretical framework, while the students must deal with the documentation (NATO AOP-48 standard), ask the laboratory staff for the required analysis outputs and make the final decision about the suitability of the rocket propellant for the intended storage period. Before and after the execution of the practice, the students are evaluated not only on the technical aspects of the activity itself, but also on their impressions related to their capabilities and the difficulties experienced during the process.

Keywords: Engineering education, transversal competences, real work experiences.