Using Student Performance And Faculty Experience To Assess A Mechanical Engineering Program

Assessing the level at which a Mechanical Engineering program achieves its stated outcomes is essential, not only to a successful ABET evaluation but also to the continued improvement and effectiveness of the program. While survey data is valuable, it should only be one component of a broader assessment plan. The Mechanical Engineering (ME) program at the United States Military Academy (USMA) has employed a method to feed graded event averages and standard deviations from student assignments, examinations, and projects into a multi-level assessment tool that provides a valuable measure of how well the students are achieving the program outcomes. In the fall of 2005, the need arose to objectively evaluate how well the students in a design course were achieving USMA’s Engineering and Technology outcomes. The author developed a method to identify the graded events that supported each of the course’s objectives, determine how well they supported those objectives, and then link objective achievement to the USMA level outcomes through a subjective pair-wise comparison of the course objectives. Positive feedback from faculty in the ME program led to expansion of this process to capture the student performance data and faculty input from all ME program courses and feed this into a program level assessment. The resulting evaluation combines the strengths of objective evaluation (based on graded events) and subjective evaluation (based on faculty experience). This paper describes the motivation for developing the assessment tool, the components of the assessment tool, how each component is integrated to provide an assessment of course objectives, and how these assessments combine to produce an evaluation of program outcomes. Examples of course and program assessment results are presented. Finally, the paper describes how the results of this assessment instrument have been used to modify course objectives and improve course content within the ME program. This tool has been extremely effective and is now a key component of the USMA ME program assessment.