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Session No: 3431

CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT EDUCATIONAL INITIATIVE: A CAMPUS-WIDE ASSESSMENT EFFORT Anand D. Sharma Ramón E. Vásquez Espinosa University of Puerto Rico University of Puerto Rico

Abstract Ever since the approval of the new Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) Engineering Criteria (EC 2000) on November 2, 1996, educational institutions across the United States have had to assess and evaluate their undergraduate engineering programs from a different perspective. The University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez undertook steps fully four years prior to the actual site visit. All six undergraduate engineering programs were evaluated during November 2002 and have been successfully reaccredited. The experience gained was subsequently utilized as a springboard to establish a new campus-wide Continuous Improvement Educational Initiative (CIEI) lead by a multi-disciplinary team. The long-term objective of this initiative is to assess not only the student learning outcomes across campus, which also includes the non-engineering disciplines, but to even develop a process by which the various support services could be assessed. This required the design and administration of customized questionnaires as instruments of assessment, including the development of an overall institutional assessment plan, and an institutional plan for student learning outcomes, for the very first time.

Objective The objective of this paper is to demonstrate how the experience gained in the process of preparing for reaccreditation of engineering programs has helped in extending the ideas of continuous improvement beyond the College of Engineering to the rest of the campus. Furthermore, the intent of this paper is to share the experience with other institutions who may also be in the early stages of preparation. Various other independent accounts of such experiences can also be found in literature, such as the Ohio State University1 and Drexel University2.

Introduction The University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez (UPRM) is one of the 11 campuses of the University of Puerto Rico System. The UPR System is a public institution, which was created by the Puerto Rico Legislative Assembly on March 12, 1903. It collectively enrolls about 67,000 students. The Mayaguez Campus (UPRM) is a land grant institution that began in 1911 with the College of Agricultural Sciences. Subsequently, other colleges were added as follows: College of Engineering (1913), College of Arts & Sciences (1943), and the College of Business (1970). The student body consists of about 11,000 undergraduate and 970 graduate students. The College of Engineering counts on an undergraduate enrollment of 4458 students, of which, 36 percent are females, which is one of the highest in engineering among U.S. institutions. This enrollment results in UPRM as ranking 15th nationally in terms of the number of bachelors

“Proceedings of the 2004 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2004, American Society for Engineering Education”

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Vasquez, R., & Sharma, A. (2004, June), Continuous Improvement Educational Initiative: A Campus Wide Assessment Effort Paper presented at 2004 Annual Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--12829