Effective evaluation strategies to meet global accreditation requirements

With the ongoing internationalisation of the engineering profession there is an ever increasing need for universities to provide robust evaluation of the quality of their undergraduate degree programs and to benchmark that quality internationally. It is important that the claims made of course evaluation and renewal, during the evaluation-accreditation process, can be substantiated and the tenuous connection between course evaluation and international acceptance as a professional engineer, be strengthened. There are a variety of methods used to evaluate courses and programs including student questionnaires, final grades, progression-retention data, and graduate attribute and competency mapping. The authors compared typical examples of such approaches to study the robustness of the link between the data collected and the evaluative judgments. It was found that there is a great deal of inference involved in the process and that the causative link between curriculum design and pedagogy, and skills and attributes, is often tenuous. Some of these approaches should not be taken as final evaluation outcomes, but rather inputs to a larger overarching evaluation strategy. It was concluded that a “program logic” approach such as that used by the University of Wisconsin, Extension, Program Development and Evaluation Model offers a superior approach for capturing and assessing the causal connections between local evaluation and international accreditation.