Doing Assessment During A Time Of Administrative And Curricular Change

Our university has recently gone through the ABET EC-2000 review process. Like many other universities, we have integrated this process with our efforts to improve assessment of our academic programs and college operations. This paper documents some of the processes that we have successfully developed to deal with these issues. There are some things that made our process significantly different from that of most other schools who have had to adapt to the new way ABET accreditation is being done. During the last 6 six years, four dramatic changes occurred within our college. We would have made these changes without the impetus of the ABET process, but these changes made the assessment process much more challenging that it would have been otherwise. In some ways the challenge helped facilitate our assessment. The first change was the moving of the math, physics, and chemistry programs (and faculty) into our college making it the College of Engineering and Science. The second major change was the adoption in 1996 of a nontraditional, but more streamlined organizational structure. For example, we no longer have traditional departments, but have maintained traditional academic programs in mechanical engineering, biomedical engineering, etc. The third and fourth major changes came at about the same time in 1999. We had begun to create an integrated freshman and sophomore engineering program. We had a small pilot program beginning in the fall of 1997 and a larger pilot program starting in the fall of 1998. While we were in the midst of this transition, our state governing board required us to lower the number of semester hours in our programs to 128. Most of the engineering curricula required about 138 hours at that time. Faced with the mandated change in lowering the hours and the previous commitment to go to an integrated curricula, most of our programs also made significant changes in our junior and senior level courses (instead of just eliminating some courses to get to the lower level). Managing all of these changes, and continuing to assess their impact on our programs, has proven to be a challenging task. As we developed methods to assess our programs, we also developed instruments to assess the effectiveness of individual courses. This paper will explain how this was accomplished.