ABET Assessment : Is It Really as Difficult as It Seems ?

While EC2000 was developed with the laudable goals of ensuring "program improvement and quality assurance in higher education" [1], from the point of view of the ABET accreditation visitor and the programs being evaluated, the EC2000 criteria can be both more difficult to understand and more difficult to apply than the more specific and straightforward criteria which they replaced. In addition to the process elements which the EAC has intended to be included as part of the EC2000 evaluation, the difficulties of assessing some of the required a-k criteria, such as "lifelong learning" and "global considerations," as well as the increasingly expected "triangularization" of outcomes, have intimidated evaluators and universities alike. This paper gives commonsense examples in which the requirements can be met by a small program without an undue extra burden on the faculty.