7.7 Cherish it

At project completion, many of the benefits of project experience can be lost if students think the exercise is "all over".

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This bundle encourages students to see project products as having a lifetime beyond assessment, and their own university careers; this encourages greater pride in their work and more reflection on its production.

The way it works is to require project reports to be submitted in duplicate. After assessment, one is returned to the student and the other is filed somewhere visible for future reference. Electronic access could also work, and would have the merit of immediate international access. When students see their own work on (permanent or semi-permanent) public display, they are encouraged to take pride in it and may well re-visit it from time to time. Such visits nearly always result in increasingly mature reflection on what they did, often with the benefit of intervening experience.

Over time, success can be judged by students examining the work of others and remarking "I could do better than that", or similar, or if they draw attention to the hazards and benefits of public availability during production. A more immediate test of success is an accumulation of reports from earlier years.

It works better if students are required to read one or more reports from earlier years from the accessible pool, since foreknowledge that the project deliverables will be filed publicly can also affect the sense of pride students take in project conduct.

It doesn't work if for some reason a project is of low quality, in which case "image" problems in its public availability may be expressed. It is possible that easy access to reports and grades may provoke comparisons leading to appeals (justified and unjustified), or that those taking especial pride may wish to update/edit their reports before public filing. If paper copies are filed for public access, significant filing space is a necessity, and the material often (usually) ages after 5 or so years.