Process for ABET Accreditation in a Systems Engineering Undergraduate Program

Background Accreditation of engineering undergraduate programs is very important to both the university and the students graduating from the program. The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, ABET, is an accreditation organization for college and university programs in applied science, computing, engineering, and technology. The quality of engineering programs has become a fundamental issue in the educational system in the United States. Accreditation confirms that the institution or the program meets the minimum quality criteria. ABET has become more important when licensure is required in many states for engineers to practice. According to information provided in ABET website, “Many state board of professional licensure in engineering and surveying require applicants to have graduated from an ABET-accredited program. In states where non-ABET graduates are permitted to be licensed, an additional four to eight years of work experience may be required.” (www.abet.org) Some of the advantages of accreditation of the program or institutions are as follows: (www.abet.org) ♥ Accreditation provides structured method to assess, evaluate, and improve the qualify of the program ♥ Accreditation helps students and families choose quality programs ♥ Accreditation enables employers to recruit graduates that are well-prepared ♥ Accreditation is used by registration, licensure, and certification boards to screen applicants From the ABET Viewpoints Volume 1, it is pointed out that ABET helps improving Ethics Awareness in higher education [Viewpoints 2005]. ABET provides a sets of goals and objectives for accreditation and evaluates and certifies the engineering related education. After requesting an evaluation of its program, the faculty develops a methodology of assessing the performance with respect to outcomes that are defined in ABET criteria. Each engineering program develops its objectives and performs internal evaluation to meet ABET criteria. Sources in literature describe different approaches and present various tools to design effective processes for evaluating engineering education and to satisfy ABET criteria. Miller and Olds introduce an evaluation matrix which provides performance criteria, implementation strategies, and evaluation methods. (Olds 1998) Owen, Scales, and Leonard explain the importance of creating a database of outcome indicators for engineering programs. There are many other sources in the literature describing different techniques to create surveys for measuring success and providing strategies to integrate assessment and evaluation into engineering education [Owen 1999]. Besides the sources in literature, experiences of institutions when they were accredited provide various approaches. The United States Military Academy (USMA) prepared multiple programs for a joint ABET accreditation. They first established the committees for each department and developed cross-program reviews. The cross-program review helped them to identify problem areas and make to correction early. By assigning individual faculty members to be responsible for documenting, the outcome monitoring was established [Huggins 2002]. The ECE Department at Cal Poly Pomona developed overall objectives to get accredited: Reviewing department goals and objectives, justifying the program if it meets the goals and objectives, justifying the students if they meet the goals and objectives, assessment and improvement of the program, reviewing course outline, and putting the notebooks together. (http://www.csupomona.edu/~ece/eceweb/abet.html) The College of Engineering at The University of Wisconsin Madison outlined four primary activities: Developing department level outcomes, developing course objectives for undergraduate courses, hosting a working conference on ABET preparation, and developing a web-site for accreditation and assessment (Pfatteicher 2000). At the University of Arizona, the department of Engineering established two teams: ABET implementation team and ABET assessment team. The implementation team consisted of one person from each department to coordinate the activities and assessment team had individuals with specific skills. They created educational objectives and expected outcomes. Expected outcomes later were expressed in terms of measurable activities such as the outcome of working in a multi-disciplinary team was expressed in terms of completing team lab exercises and completing Engineering 102 projects. They used primary assessment tools such as student, alumni, and faculty surveys and portfolios (Johnson 1999). As can be seen by the various references above, each engineering department may use different processes to achieve the same results, accreditation. The purpose of this paper is to present the process used by the Systems Engineering and Operations Research Department at George Mason University to accredit our Systems Engineering undergraduate program.