Industry and academia around the world stress the importance of professional skills (also known as soft
skills, generic skills, or transferable skills) so it is necessary to be able to assess students’ attainment of
these skills. An innovative method was developed in the USA for assessment of these skills in an
engineering program (Ater Kranov, Hauser, Olsen, & Girardeau, 2008); this method was based around
student discussion of an open-ended, unresolved, discipline-related problem, held face-to-face and
subsequently analyzed using a rubric. In the research project described here, the method was adapted for
the United Arab Emirates by writing appropriate scenarios for computing students, by modifying the
rubric and by running the discussion on an online discussion board. The primary aims were to determine
the feasibility of adapting the method and to examine its suitability. The results of the study showed that
the method can be adapted and employed very successfully with UAE students. This paper presents the
method, its adaptation and implementation, and the results obtained.