Laboratory exercises have created benefits in student learning. Making laboratories open ended pushes students to have an independent perspective and to think harder. An open-ended experiment is where students are given the flexibility to develop their own experiments. Outcome-based education is an educational theory that bases each part of an educational system around objectives. Measuring programme outcomes (POs) in engineering education is a challenge for teaching faculty in general, and doing so for a laboratory programme and through an open-ended experiment, is even more challenging. This article explains the planning and execution of conducting an open-ended experiment in a metal cutting laboratory to enhance active learning. If also focuses on the evaluation process, rubrics developed, and attainment of POs in the Industrial and Production Engineering (IPE) programme.