An Assessment Framework for Identifying Information Technology Bachelor Programs

What is an IT Bachelor program and how can one be identified? In recent years, specific IT programs have arisen in the US to fill an industry need not directly provided for by other computing disciplines. IT programs are growing in number and influence yet can be hard to identify for several reasons: They are not always titled “Information Technology.” They are housed in various colleges and schools – such as engineering, business, computing, and information science. Also, they may not have associated themselves with ABET and hence may not be accredited. We have undertaken research that uses the ACM IT 2008 model curriculum to identify the “fit” between a set of minimum criteria and published university undergraduate curriculum regardless of the title, college, or professional association of the program. Our results show three groups of IT-related programs: 1. Programs that meet all the ACM IT 2008 model curriculum guidelines. 2. Programs that only partially meet the ACM IT 2008 model curriculum guidelines because they require a significant amount of courses from unrelated disciplines like business, psychology, engineering, etc. 3. Programs that partially meet the ACM IT 2008 model curriculum guidelines because the program specializes in an IT-related major such as networking, embedded systems, database administration, HCI, etc. This paper will present the criteria we propose to use as we attempt to identify all the 4-year IT programs in the USA.