Conference Session

Best Practices in Aerospace Education

Collection

2008 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Kristi Shryock, Texas A&M University; Helen Reed, Texas A&M University

Tagged Divisions

Aerospace

methods in this paper.BackgroundFounded in 1932 under the name Engineers' Council for Professional Development, ABET(formerly Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) accredits post-secondarydegree-granting programs. Many people interpret this to mean that ABET accredits departments,colleges, or even courses. In reality, ABET accredits programs, and your accreditation workshould reflect the program as a whole.Some programs treat the six-year time lag between visits with the following timeline: - Year 1 – Celebrate success of previous ABET visit. - Years 2-4 – Feel that ABET is a long time away. - Year 5 – Begin to worry about ABET visit the following year, and survey every class imaginable to be ready for year 6 with the

Conference Session

Preparing a Modern Aerospace Workforce

Collection

2008 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

George Bibel, University of North Dakota

Tagged Divisions

Aerospace

, AlohaAirlines inspected two other 737’s with 90,051 and 85,409. These two planes wereimmediately scrapped on the spot.Although the Aloha problem could have been prevented with more frequent inspectionsand Boeing already had an improved lap joint design in place, this near disaster triggereda national research effort. Improvements in inspection techniques and fatigue designwere developed. New methods to reflect the weakening effect of small fatigue cracks inlined up rivet holes were developed through testing and analysis.Incidentally the Aloha blast damage demonstrates how well a modern damage tolerantdesigned airplane hangs together. A surprising number of aircraft have safely landedafter a bombing.Less well known is the more recent China Airlines

Conference Session

Preparing a Modern Aerospace Workforce

Collection

2008 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Narayanan Komerath, Georgia Institute of Technology

Tagged Divisions

Aerospace

, but I dowonder how many good analyses of Martian flight got trashed as “losers” in the process.Engineering professors should reflect on the wisdom of outsourcing student evaluation to theleast thoughtful / most managerially-mobile in industry. Another comment that left a deepimpression on me years ago came from a senior NASA manager, about the AIAA Student PaperCompetition that he had just judged: “Did you see the winner’s presentation? Wow! He lookedJUST LIKE Tom Cruise!” However, the fact remains that national competitions have a veryimportant place in concept development curricula, as long as they are not taken too seriously.A resource for cross-disciplinary thinking and daring innovation in the past decade was theNASA Institute of

Conference Session

Preparing the Future Workforce in Aerospace

Collection

2008 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Narayanan Komerath, Georgia Institute of Technology

Tagged Divisions

Aerospace

Page 13.587.9assigning final grades (per school policy, no test, let alone the final exam, is to be graded byanyone other than the academic faculty member): “For the people who got less than 60 percentoverall, I don’t feel that I can give an A – so give them Bs.” Most recent graduates havegraduated “with honors” or better. But the most incendiary indicator of a troubling situationcomes from comparing the grades given by instructors between different sections of the samecourse taught in the same semester, and then comparing the record of individual instructorsacross courses and years. Some extreme trends emerge in the data. They reflect the situationrecorded by Kennedy above: some instructors have been giving A grades to virtually everyonewho