Broad faculty participation in course-level evaluation of student outcomes supporting continuous improvement of an undergraduate engineering program

As part of the ABET accreditation process, each engineering program is to have a continuous improvement process by which the program student outcomes (SO) are evaluated and used to as input to program changes, especially changes in the curriculum. One part of the process is course-level assessment of SO. Some programs place a heavy reliance on senior-level engineering design courses to assess the student outcomes and little reliance on many other engineering courses. A potential shortcoming of this is that faculty teaching courses know little about the continuous improvement process and miss the opportunity to document contributions to the attainment of student outcomes. A different approach is that each required undergraduate engineering course provide some input into the continuous improvement process. The goal is to not overly burden a few classes with many assessment of SO, but to spread the collection and analysis of SO to many classes. Other than capstone senior design classes, each required class collects and analyzes data for only two SO although many courses address more than two. Over many years, the curriculum committee has worked to distribute the SO throughout the program so that there isn't an imbalance with many courses providing data for a SO while few courses contributing to another SO. This mapping of SO throughout the curriculum is evaluate and adjusted at the beginning of an assessment cycle. Overall, each course has a reduced documentation load and more faculty become involved in the continuous improvement process. This broader participation has encouraged faculty to document topics in their courses which have normally gone undocumented. A continual challenge is to help faculty plan their course so the collection of data is manageable and not left to the end of the semester. Examples of how to assess each SO have been generated by the curriculum committee and shared with faculty to inspire them to think beyond the use of final exam questions to assess SO in their courses.