Assessing Educational Performance: A Strategic Approach

The 21 st century promises to be an extraordinarily challenging era. The demands of a new technology revolution, globalization, pressing social concerns and a renaissance in business ethics all call for a new kind of engineer. The 21 st century engineer must possess not only technical skills but also interdisciplinary skills and a firm foundation for making ethical decisions. Engineering schools have a responsibility to develop our students’ leadership skills in order that they may improve the quality of life through science and engineering. How will we know if we have properly prepared our students? Students and employers tend to rate graduate programs by their perceived quality, but are our current assessment methods adequate for the future? Is there one good way to evaluate and compare graduate programs? Are universities expanding their use of quantitative metrics for evaluating their programs? A number of methods are used to evaluate engineering programs. Among them are the Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence, the ABET Criteria for Accrediting Engineering Programs, and U.S. News and World Report magazine ranking of America’s Best Colleges. This paper presents the assessment method used by the School of Engineering at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. We use the Malcolm Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence to assess our overall performance. Then we measure our performance against our mission and the program objectives and outcomes. We will discuss our experience with this assessment method and provide some comparisons with other assessment methods.