ACAT: A Web-Based Software Tool to Facilitate Course Assessment for ABET Accreditation

There are several institutions that accredit educational programs and require documentation to ensure that an educational program regularly meets certain criteria. This paper focuses on ABET program. They require that programs show student achievement and certain course outcomes. Documentation of this requirement is particularly burdensome. There is no standard method of generating these reports, so each institution handles it differently. This might involve manual collection of the data which is time very consuming. A software tool that facilitates this collection of the data and automatically generates the required reports would save institutions time and money. This paper presents such a tool, named ACAT (ABET Course Assessment Tool), it is a web-based application designed to assist in the collecting of data and generation of standardized assessment reports. This paper focuses on design and usability aspects of the proposed ACAT tool and provides implementation and operation details.