Looking beyond accreditation [student learning assessment]

Ever since the approval of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) Engineering Criteria (EC 2000) on November 2, 1996, educational institutions across the United States have had to assess and evaluate their undergraduate engineering programs from a different perspective. The University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez undertook steps fully four years prior to the actual site visit. All six undergraduate engineering programs were evaluated during November 2002 and have been successfully reaccredited. The experience gained was subsequently utilized as a springboard to establish a campus-wide continuous improvement educational initiative (CIEI) lead by a multidisciplinary team. The long-term objective of this initiative is to assess not only the student learning outcomes across campus, which also includes the nonengineering disciplines, but to even develop a process by which the various support services could be assessed. This required the design and administration of customized questionnaires as instruments of assessment, including the development of an overall institutional assessment plan, and an institutional plan for student learning outcomes, for the very first time.