How an Engineering College Uses a University’s Quality Enhancement System to Generate and Manage Evidence for Multiple Accreditation and Accountability Bodies

Abstract

Colleges and universities interact with multiple constituents or quality monitoring groups that require programme‐level assessment of student learning. These required assessments might be used to demonstrate accountability, programme improvement or a combination of both. These demands often challenge instructional faculty to choose between the competing interests of research in their discipline and research on student learning for assessment purposes. This article offers one approach for engineering departments that simultaneously makes student learning research more meaningful for instructional faculty while farming out to the central administration those jobs it does not have the time or resources to do effectively. An engineering programme is better able to ensure the ownership, development and integrity of and research into its own curriculum if it has a centralized university improvement system that presents unit‐level quality management research to external market and accountability groups.

Keywords:

• accreditation
• assessment
• engineering
• outcomes
• quality management systems