Though officials from engineering programs across the country have described the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology as difficult to work with, board representatives say the blame lies elsewhere.
Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science administrators revealed recently that they expect five out of the eight Engineering programs undergoing ABET re-accreditation to be rated "deficient" in their methods of collecting feedback when they receive a preliminary report later this winter.
Although ABET Accreditation Director Dan Hodge would not comment specifically on Penn's accreditation situation, he says that engineering schools often bring accreditation troubles upon themselves.
Obtaining feedback from various categories of constituents -- including students, alumni and the graduate schools and employers to which engineering students go after graduation -- is one of the eight criteria that accreditation board evaluators consider.
Hodge said that schools which don't continually self-assess in the six years between visits from the accreditation board have difficulty preparing for re-accreditation at the last minute. Schools that do follow the recommended ABET protocol find visits from accreditors much easier to deal with.
Engineering professors agree that this is true, but say that it is not the reason the five programs will likely receive poor marks.
"People from [Penn] Engineering have been preparing for ABET accreditation for years," Materials Science professor Karen Winey said.
But the accreditation board still considers "deficiencies" -- like Penn's -- very important, according to Hodge. Such problems, he said, vary in how easy they are to fix.
Penn Engineering programs expecting "deficient" ratings will have 30 days to address any problems after they receive the preliminary report this semester.
The Engineering School will receive a final report over the summer. Hodge said that about 1 to 2 percent of programs evaluated per year receive ratings of "deficient" in their final reports.
Engineering administrators expect to correct any problems by the time their final assessment is issued.
The area in which Engineering's programs are expecting poor marks -- collecting feedback -- reflects a new accreditation focus, Hodge said.
About 10 years ago, the accreditation board began a shift from evaluating engineering course content to evaluating how well engineering programs meet the objectives they set for themselves.
Though Hodge said that accreditation board standards are "not really changing" at the moment, Engineering professors say that they are still being affected by the decade-old shift in criteria.
The current re-accreditation process is the Engineering School's first experience with the new standards, which makes the process much harder, Winey said.
"It's new. Everything new is hard," she added.
Though the new standards are intended to be less restrictive, according to Hodge, professors say that they are also harder to meet.
According to Bioengineering professor Kenneth Foster, the new standards can make preparation "a very burdensome job."
"Ultimately, to get accredited you have to have this massive amount of paperwork together," Foster said.
His department alone has a six-foot-high and four-foot-wide bookcase full of binders of course documentation that it had to show evaluators, he said.
Foster attributed Bioengineering's good performance in its evaluation to department Chairman Dan Hammer's meticulous preparation of paperwork.
"I gather that other departments weren't quite as conscientious and that their paperwork wasn't quite as together," he said.
