Integrated and Effective Assessment Tool to Evaluate Engineering Courses

The civil engineering program at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne was established in the fall of 2006. The program went through ABET accreditation in 2011 and was granted accreditation in August 2012. A key component of getting accreditation is the development and the implementation of an effective and continuous assessment based process to identifying strengths and weaknesses and to ensure continuous program improvements. The goal of this paper is to present an integrated assessment tool to assess course outcomes based on direct and indirect assessment measures. The tool was developed to establish consistency in the course assessment process, improve efficiency, create a better documentation process, and measures the effectiveness of educational and learning of engineering courses. The tool was developed using Excel and report the faculty and student assessments of a course. The tool is flexible and save faculty time when assessing their courses. It provides faculty with a choice to feed raw data or enter students’ final assessment data in the sheet. In addition, it gives faculty a choice to use suitable criteria and assessment tools that are appropriate to the assessment of their courses. The paper presents the old system of assessment and the need to depart to a new more efficient system; a detailed description of the tool with real examples, and the impact of the new tool in supporting ABET accreditation of the Civil Engineering program as well other programs in the department are presented.