DESIGNING AUTHENTIC INDUSTRY-ENGAGED ASSESSMENT FOR PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE IN BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

Engineering programs increasingly seek to align student learning with professional practice, yet meaningful industry collaboration often exposes misalignment between academic assessment norms and workplace expectations. This paper presents a CDIO Implementation case describing the redesign of an undergraduate business intelligence course to strengthen industrial relevance while supporting student professional development. The redesign integrated semester long, industry-inspired project work structured around team-based learning and competence oriented assessment, emphasizing authentic data, reproducible workflows, and professional collaboration tools. A single industrial partner contributed real-world datasets, problem framing, and feedback, enabling students to engage with constraints and quality standards characteristic of professional practice. Assessment and feedback were redesigned to balance team performance with individual contribution through visible artifacts (e.g. version control activity) and structured reflection, addressing persistent challenges related to workload, accountability, and fairness. Evidence from iterative course evaluations, student reflections, graduate feedback, and industry partner input indicates increased student engagement, improved coherence across learning activities, and clearer alignment between assessment criteria and professional expectations. At the same time, the collaboration revealed tensions between academic tolerance for developmental errors and industry demands for reliability and trustworthiness, highlighting the importance of explicitly preparing students to communicate differently with academic and professional audiences. The paper reflects on these tensions and outlines design principles for industry-engaged CDIO courses, including expectation alignment early in the course, sustained use of a shared industrial context, and assessment practices that foreground professional standards without sacrificing formative learning space. The case offers transferable insights for CDIO programs seeking to leverage industrial collaboration as a catalyst for student professional development through innovative assessment and feedback.