The Daily Pennsylvanian
Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science is not alone in its re-accreditation process woes.
According to professors from several universities, the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology -- a leading national engineering school accreditor -- is notoriously difficult to work with.
Administrators in the Engineering School revealed last week that five out of eight of the engineering programs being re-accredited are expected to be labeled "deficient" in their methods of assessing student learning later this winter.
"I've certainly heard my share of horror stories about schools that had trouble with ABET," Harvey Mudd College engineering professor Clive Dym said. "I wouldn't necessarily assume that Penn Engineering is going south."
Penn's Engineering School is not the only school that has been criticized from the board for its methods of obtaining feedback.
About seven or eight years ago, the department of engineering at Harvey Mudd ran into very similar problems, according to Dym.
Harvey Mudd's accreditation was renewed for only three years -- as opposed to the maximum six-year renewal -- because "we didn't demonstrate a formal process for evaluating feedback," Dym said.
Thanks to a new system of rubrics to evaluate student achievement, Harvey Mudd's engineering department was reaccredited for a full six years in 2004, a sign that it had made significant improvement under accreditation board standards. It is currently ranked second by U.S. News out of all engineering programs offering degrees up to a master's.
The accreditation board currently reviews nearly 3,000 programs at over 500 American colleges and universities, including Penn, according to the organization's Web site.
In an e-mail sent to all Engineering undergraduates yesterday, Engineering Dean Eduardo Glandt assured students that the expected "deficiencies" were only in regard to "data collection."
Glandt wrote that the board's re-accreditation process is "built around an elaborate set of check lists, and it so happened that we were not following some of them in our reporting."
Nevertheless, he went on to say, "each of the programs under review has such data available, which is being organized to be presented in the format expected by ABET."
According to the accreditation board, assessing the strength of a program includes gaining feedback from a variety of sources -- including students, alumni, faculty members, employers and graduate schools to which students matriculate after graduation. This is done in order to check whether the programs are meeting their teaching objectives and whether curriculum modifications are necessary.
The Engineering School was ranked 29th in U.S. News and World Report's 2006 ranking of undergraduate engineering programs that offer doctorates. All ABET-accredited programs are included in the ranking.
Since review by ABET is voluntary, some engineering schools decide it is simply not worth the hassle.
"For many years, we just didn't bother," said John Morris, a materials science professor at the University of California in Berkeley's engineering school. "It was too much trouble. ... It's very time consuming."
The Berkeley College of Engineering is currently going through its first-ever accreditation process.
If Berkeley's experience is at all typical, it will most likely run into some bumps along the way.
"I bet every school that goes through ABET has the same kinds of problems," said Reginald Mitchell, a mechanical engineering professor at Stanford University.
According to Mitchell, the accreditation never threatened Stanford's engineering school with loss of accreditation during its last renewal, but the accreditor did make serious curriculum suggestions.
Penn Engineering administrators should receive a preliminary report from the board by early March. The school then has 30 days to prove that it will make the necessary changes.
The final re-accreditation report will be released over the summer. Engineering administrators expect that all eight of the school's programs will be fully re-accredited at that point.
