Developing a department-wide learning assessment program

During the last several years (to 2000), the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools (NCA) shifted the focus of its accreditation visits from resource-based to outcome-based. Faced with an accreditation visit by NCA in the fall of 1999, Purdue University began developing a university-wide learning assessment program. A council was formed at the university level, with committees in each of the schools within the university. The School of Technology was one of the lenders in developing an assessment program, which was to be expected as it is a teaching-based, rather than research-based school. Most of the faculty were reluctant to have new requirements added to their workload. Thus, it was necessary to work as a team to develop requirements that were acceptable or at least palatable to the faculty. The paper describes how an assessment program was developed in the Department of Electrical Engineering Technology (EET) at Purdue in the hope that it will provide help to others who are starting the process of developing an assessment program