ECAT: An electronic data analysis tool for ABET display materials

ABET, Inc. requires that display materials, including syllabuses, assignments and examples of student work, be collected the year before an accreditation site visit. The Exhibit Collection and Analysis Tool (ECAT) was created to electronically store and organize display materials for our program in a manner that was useful for ABET program evaluators. ECAT was designed as a simple, maintainable, structured search engine. The ABET program evaluator who visited our institution repeatedly praised ECAT at length. ECAT was used to count the number of occurrences of assignments that support each of the eleven ABET program outcomes, resulting in a novel metric to support outcomes assessment. ECAT could be extended to include classifications in Bloom's taxonomy, to check program depth in addition to breadth. Future uses for ECAT include building an electronic portfolio for our program, similar to the e-portfolios that some engineering programs build for outcomes assessment.