Loading...
Please wait, while we are loading the content...
Similar Documents
A Tool for ABET Accreditation
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Dickson, Jonathan Paul Colorado, Denver |
| Copyright Year | 2013 |
| Abstract | The accreditation process from ABET is anticipated with trepidation by academic institutions. The review process, however, is well defined and effective steps can be undertaken to succeed in accreditation. Much of the uncertainty can be minimized. Based on our experience and success we have developed a software package to automate the process. We will demonstrate a prototype at the conference. Background: The ABET review process, once understood, can lead to self-initiated steps to track, document, analyze, report, and develop strategies for improvement. Our tool will help streamline this for Criteria 3, perhaps the most demanding and important criteria of all the ABET criteria. Generally the Criteria 3 get satisfied across a large number of courses. ABET in their Criteria 3 indicate that “The program must have documented student outcomes that prepare graduates to attain the program educational objectives.” The criteria are typically met across a number of junior and senior level courses. We use S/U/(satisfactory/unsatisfactory/Not Available) notation to identify whether a student met one or more of these criteria in a given course. An S roughly maps to grades of C or better, but is not always a given. Thus, each faculty member should manually record these letter grades for each of his/her course students in a given semester. Our engineering curriculum typically offers 12 courses at junior and senior levels every semester, and has typical enrollments of 18 per course. A typical student spends 6 or more semesters in our program to satisfy the graduation requirements. We graduate 20 to 25 students in the computer engineering program every year. This represents a large database of information. Further, it is a requisite to show not only that all the students who graduated met these criteria, but also that other students still in the program are making adequate progress. Still further, there is a need to show continuous improvement, that is, that the students are acquiring these skills earlier in their career and more consistently, perhaps in more diverse settings. The present manual approach requires the ABET coordinator to collect all of this info from professors who taught courses during the past six years which should adequately cover all the graduating seniors in a given year. Our App will automate the data collection, analysis, and presentation steps. Further, it is our goal to provide timely feedback so as to ensure that additional courses are scheduled so that any graduating student would have automatically met the ABET Criteria 3. An additional goal is to analyze the results to identify major problems before they arise. As an example, a cohort of juniors may not be making progress towards meeting the ABET Criteria 3. To understand the implication of such a situation, one also needs to gain access to the individual student grades and academic history, presumably from the university’s student transcripts database (typically in the Registrar’s Office), so appropriate measures can be undertaken. The ultimate goal would be to ensure that we are meeting the ABET Criteria 3 in its entirety, thus ensuring that we are graduating our seniors with the best chance of success in the real world. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.asee.org/public/conferences/20/papers/7226/download |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://csi.fau.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/ABET-Final-03272013-CSI-Site-Copy.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://peer.asee.org/a-tool-for-abet-accreditation.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://csi.fau.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/ABET-Draft-Paper.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://csi.fau.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/ABET-Paper-Draft.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
