Difficulties in the School of Engineering and Applied Science's re-accreditation process will most likely not hurt its reputation as a top school in its field, experts say.
The U.S. News and World Report's 2007 ranking of the best undergraduate engineering programs -- a major measure of an engineering school's prestige -- will be complete before the Engineering School receives its final report from the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology over the summer.
In the magazine's 2006 rankings, U.S. News placed Penn's Engineering School as the 29th best that offers doctoral degrees.
Engineering administrators said last week that they expect five out of the school's eight programs up for re-accreditation to be cited for "deficiencies" for their methods of obtaining feedback on student learning.
The deficiencies will be detailed in a preliminary report later this winter. The accreditation board will issue a final report on the school's status this summer, and administrators expect that the Engineering School will be re-accredited.
Accreditation board officials did not return repeated phone calls for comment.
Ultimately, representatives from U.S. News said that the "deficiencies," are unlikely to affect Penn's ranking.
According to Robert Morse, who is in charge of the magazine's college rankings, the list -- which includes all engineering schools with at least one ABET-accredited program -- is "100 percent subjective" and is based solely on approximately 300 engineering administrators' views on which engineering schools are the best in the country.
Since no official information about the Penn Engineering School's accreditation status will be made public before the magazine's surveying of administrators ends in mid-June, any accreditation problems the school is having are unlikely to influence the deans' opinions.
And other experts say that the school's overall image is not at stake.
According to Yale mechanical engineering professor Mitchell Smooke, the accreditation board prefers to give schools second chances -- in the form of additional visits or required documentation -- rather than deny accreditation.
"Engineering at Penn will survive and flourish," Smooke said. "I guarantee it. This is just a minor blip."
Cornell engineering Dean Deborah Cox said that the value of ABET accreditation -- and thus any possible impact on the Penn Engineering School's reputation -- varies depending on the beholder's perspective.
Accreditation matters little to prospective students because they "probably don't have as much knowledge of ABET," Cox said.
On the other hand, professional associations -- such as the American Society of Civil Engineers -- help develop criteria used to gauge engineering programs' success and value accreditation highly as a result.
And employers from traditional engineering majors -- such as civil, electrical and mechanical -- tend to hold ABET accreditation in higher regard than those in more modern engineering fields, Cox said.
Engineering School professors, meanwhile, defend their programs by stressing that "deficiencies" in collecting feedback are very minor when compared to the many positive things the accreditation board had to say about Penn's school.
"Many factors were superb ... but there's no label called superb," said Computer and Information Science professor Norman Badler, who was the school's associate dean through the end of last year.
Badler added that the things that most affect students -- such as facilities, faculty, the library and instructional materials -- were free of criticism.
For Chemical Engineering Department Chairman John Vohs, the "deficiencies" are a "non-issue."
"We're accredited now and we'll be accredited in the future," Vohs said.
Students themselves varied in their views of how much the re-accreditation difficulties would affect the school's reputation.
"The word around campus is that the Engineering School isn't so good, but I don't think that's the case," Engineering sophomore Andrea Loayza said. "I'm pretty confident that they'll be able to fix the problem soon."
