Transitioning to the New ABET Student Outcomes: Architecture Development for a Systems Engineering Degree Program

Systems engineering degree programs are accredited by the Engineering Accreditation Commission (EAC) of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). The accreditation process includes evaluation of a program’s development and assessment of defined student outcomes (SO) (i.e. Criterion 3). These outcomes were recently revised by ABET for programs seeking accreditation in 2019 and later. The systems engineering degree program at the United States Air Force Academy has been twice accredited by ABET and will be revisited in 2020. In preparation for this visit and as part of its continuous improvement process, the Academy has revised its assessment architecture starting with a transition to the new ABET SOs. Following update to the new SOs, observable performance criteria (PC) were also revised. Updated traceability matrices were then developed to map into the Academy’s cross-department, multidisciplinary curriculum. These curriculum mappings ensure full coverage of the SOs and serve as a basis for requests for assessment data to the various course directors. It has been observed that this strong traceability and clarity of data required of administering course directors is essential to building a tenable assessment process. This paper provides an overview and roadmap for other systems engineering programs seeking to revise their assessment architecture in preparation for ABET accreditation. The revision process, developed products of the assessment architecture, and observations on their implementation are provided.