Accrediting Group Seeks New Perspectives

 By Danielle Boykin

NSPE Staff Writer

For more than 70 years, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology has been responsible for ensuring that the nation’s colleges and universities are providing the best education for the next generation of engineers. The board made sweeping changes in 1996 when it adopted Engineering Criteria 2000, which bases accreditation on what students learn rather than how they are taught, allowing programs to be more flexible and innovative.

Now ABET is aiming to make another significant change to the evaluation of engineering programs. Specifically, ABET wants to revamp the process for selecting and training program evaluators and encourage more participation from practicing engineers in industry and private practice.

“We are interested in getting the right people doing the right thing,” says Maryanne Weiss, director of member services at ABET. “We also want to broaden the profile of the individuals that are a part of this process.”

The organization realized that establishing Engineering Criteria 2000 was a step toward improving engineering education, but a piece of the puzzle was missing. “We had really placed a lot of effort on getting the outside community up to speed through workshops and presentations so that faculty was onboard, but our own evaluators were lagging in knowledge of their new role in this system,” says Weiss.

ABET has 1,500 expert volunteers, selected and trained by some of the 30 professional and technical societies. Each year, 500-600 volunteers visit colleges and universities to evaluate engineering programs for the purpose of establishing or maintaining accreditation. “We have a community of volunteers and they are top-notch,” says Weiss. “But we know we can do better,” she adds.

ABET’s Participation Project is a five-phase project that began in November. It covers volunteer selection and recruitment, training and certification, performance evaluation, roles and responsibilities, and strategies for continuous improvement. The project is set to end in 2006 with full implementation tentatively set for 2007.

“We want a system that looks at the life of a program evaluator from the time he or she is recruited to when we are rewarding or remediating their performance,” says Weiss. “We want to optimize the skills, talents, and knowledge of our volunteers.”

ABET President Richard Anderson believes that it is critical that evaluators positively represent the organization and are qualified to do the necessary tasks. “My biggest fear is that we, as ABET, will send a poorly trained evaluator to a program and that’s grossly unfair,” says Anderson, a professional engineer who served as an evaluator from 1990 to 1994 and later served as a team chair for six years. “We can afford no mistakes and we have zero tolerance for a poorly performing evaluator. And in order to have that zero tolerance be effective, we have to assure that the training is topnotch.”

Anderson adds, “It’s very important that our constituents see a good face from ABET and this good face comes from our volunteers.”

In addition to making sure that evaluators represent ABET well, the project is also aiming to recruit more engineering practitioners. According to Weiss, nearly 60% of evaluators are from academia, but the goal is to have 50% of volunteers from academia and 50% represented by technical and mid-career professionals from industry, consulting firms, and government.

“We need to do a better job of reaching out to people beyond our immediate scope,” says Weiss. “We would be able to do this through a process that is more standardized where our societies could use materials when they go out to their annual, regional, or chapter meetings to spark the interest of someone in industry and more women and underrepresented minorities.”

NSPE member and Professional Engineer Chik Erzurumlu believes that ABET has made a good decision to embark on this project and should develop a uniform program. Erzurumlu has served as an evaluator and trains new evaluators during the NSPE Winter Meeting and Annual Convention.

“The system is not going to work unless the people in the trenches, whether they are in academia or the industry, contribute to it,” says Erzurumlu, a civil engineering professor at Portland State University in Oregon and the immediate past chair of NSPE’s Professional Engineers in Education.

Erzurumlu sees the high value of increasing participation from practitioners. “Once you get committed non-academic folks as evaluators, they are often the best,” he says. “ They are not doing it because there is something in it for them. They are doing it because of the desire to make sure our engineering graduates are competent professionals they would be proud to employ.”

Erzurumlu is firm in the belief that NSPE needs to continue playing a role in training evaluators. “The best thing we can do is draw from the NSPE membership to populate the industrial pool,” he says.

Anderson realizes the difficulty in drawing practicing engineers into the program. “It’s hard to attract practitioners because they can’t see the immediate benefits,” says the civil engineer who works for Somat Engineering Inc. in Detroit. “This takes people who can look down the road and say, ‘Yes, I want to affect engineering education.’ If you are an educator, you are subject to the criteria of ABET every six years, and you better be prepared, so it’s easier for them to see the immediate payoff.”

When Anderson volunteered to become an evaluator more than a decade ago he was driven by a desire to give back to the profession and to mold engineering education, but he did not know fully what to expect. “As a practitioner it was very, very interesting,” he recalls. “When I actually started evaluating civil engineering programs, I found it to be very enjoyable.”

Anderson also found that the benefits outweighed the time commitment. Currently, formal training is typically limited to one day, and some societies require that new evaluators observe a veteran evaluator during a live visit. There are also documents that an evaluator must read before the site visit, which can take up to eight hours to review for thorough preparation.

Campus visits are typically during the fall from a Sunday afternoon to a Tuesday afternoon and most evaluators are required to make one site visit per year and sometimes two per year. During these visits, evaluators make a qualitative assessment of factors that cannot be documented in a written questionnaire. They interview faculty and students; visit laboratories, libraries, and classrooms; review student work; and conduct a detailed examination of the materials compiled by the institution. By the end of the visit, evaluators provide the institution with a preliminary assessment of its strong points and problem areas, which is done during numerous meetings with program and college administrators.

Anderson highly recommends that engineers who are genuinely concerned about the future of the profession should get involved. “These are your future employees that will be graduating from these programs and you want the best employees that you can possibly get,” he says. “In order to do that, you’ve got to participate in the educational process.”

Become a qualified evaluator for ABET engineering programs by attending a session of EAC-ABET Evaluator Training at the NSPE 2005 Annual Convention in Chicago on Saturday, July 9, 9-5 p.m. Registration is $125 and includes lunch. To register, visit the NSPE 2005 Annual Convention Web site at www.nspe.org. For more information, contact Mary Maul at mmaul@nspe.org or 703-684-2833.

Republished from the April 2005 Engineering Times, a publication of the National Society of Professional Engineers.