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Abstract-The push for a culture of evidence that guides improvement in higher-education has made outcome-based assessment a necessity. Furthermore, the recent move by ABET's CAC into more rigorous assessment has caused anxiety among faculty and administrators. Assessment leaders face various challenges including process design and implementation, faculty buy-in, and resources availability. This paper presents a bottom-up outcome-based assessment approach that facilitates faculty participation while simplifying the assessment and reporting processes. The proposed approach has been implemented and used for the successful accreditation of a computer science program, and can be easily adapted to any higher education program.
Keywords: Program Outcome Assessment, ABET Accreditation
I. INTRODUCTION
Assessing learning has been at the heart of higher edu- cation ever since its inception; grades as well as retention and graduation rates have always been used as measures of students performance. However, over the past 40 years, there has been an increasing pressure on higher educa- tion in order to create a culture of evidence that guides improvements in teaching and learning. While the demand to establish such a culture appears to be new, it has a long lineage and can be traced back as far as 1936 when the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching made a strong argument for improving higher education through a process that includes setting up acceptable standards and devising appropriate methods of measuring achievement while introducing flexibility in educational offerings [1]. As- sessment of students learning has consequently progressed from the rise and development of standardized tests, to the assessment of learning for general and graduate education, and finally to the current era of external accountability [2]. A recent study by the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment has concluded that the most common uses of assessment data are to primarily prepare for program and institutional accreditation [3]; among all schools, the least common uses for assessment data are for making daily resource decisions, admissions and transfer policies, and faculty/staff performance. The study also noted that most institutions conduct learning outcomes assessment on a shoestring while gaining faculty involvement and support in assessment remains a major challenge. The push for the "culture of evidence" has been capped by a new wave of outcomes-based assessment wars among professional and regional accreditation...