Thanks so much for letting us spend so much of your precious meeting times! We hope you learned a couple things you hadn’t heard before, and feel that the communication gates are wide open. That was the real goal of these presentations.

Even though it may be impossible to design an academic program on campus to be fully inclusive of everyone, we do believe that with some open minds and folks coming forward, we can absolutely build something that benefits as much of the community as possible. All problem-solving, including this design problem of making an engineering program, is best served by incorporating diverse feedback, so please reach out in whatever format works for you.

Hana and Marisa McCarthy from the Provost’s office, Assessment and Accreditation support, will be going to the 2018 ABET symposium in San Diego next month! We hope to learn everything we can about how to make sure we are meeting the criteria for ABET accreditation, how to design proper assessment into the curriculum, and other critical items.

If you have any experience with professional accreditation programs and can think of specific questions we should be sure to ask, please let us know here in comments or feedback! Thank you!

ABET = Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology.

http://www.abet.org/

ABET accreditation is a professional accreditation for degree-granting programs in the engineering and technology fields. We should have this accreditation because some students going through our program will likely seek professional licensing later on.

There are many different program-specific accreditations we can pursue and they have different requirements for being approved by ABET. For example a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering has many more requirements of accreditation prescriptively spelled out than a “general” Bachelor of Science in Engineering, in terms of number of hours of certain coursework in the curriculum, qualifications of faculty, and equipment and facilities, to name a few of the categories.

There is ongoing discussion about how to best meet accreditation requirements given the capacity of our particular institution.

Thanks for checking out this blog! We’ll be periodically posting updates and storing information here concerning the development of the new Engineering program at USF. Feel free to comment on posts or use the feedback form (soon to be set up) for questions, suggestions, and to ask how to get involved. Contributors to this blog are primarily College of Arts & Sciences Associate Dean Chris Brooks, College of Arts & Sciences Resources and Planning Manager Katie Baum, and Engineering Program Interim Director Hana Böttger (Associate Prof in Dept of Art + Architecture).