The Impact Of Benchmarking Peer Institutions In Curricular Reform

Benchmarking peer institutions should be viewed as an essential element in curricular reform, i.e., continuous quality improvement (CQI) in both the undergraduate and graduate curriculum. The process of benchmarking can also be viewed as an opportunity to establish a network of individuals who share common interests and potentially a common vision regarding educational reform. This paper describes the outcomes of a survey of 36 institutions regarding the content of their electrical engineering service courses. The primary objective of this survey was to assess how national and regional universities used these courses to achieve their respective undergraduate engineering educational program objectives. We describe how we used these data to develop local reform strategies for service courses. We also describe the implications of these results for identifying the opportunities for reform and the challenges to institutionalizing curricular changes.