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Session 2209

EC2000: Lessons learned during review of a biomedical engineering undergraduate program

John B. Troy Northwestern University

Abstract

The Biomedical Engineering Undergraduate Program at Northwestern University experienced its first review under EC2000 in this academic year. The campus visit by the evaluation team took place in October 1999. Preparations for the accreditation review had been underway obviously for a number of years and were stepped into high gear for the final twenty- four months preceding the visit. This is my eleventh year as chairman of the undergraduate program in biomedical engineering at Northwestern University, and I have experience of shepherding my department through accreditation reviews of our undergraduate program under both the old ABET criteria and now under EC2000. In this report I provide an account of how we at Northwestern University prepared for the accreditation review, what we learnt through the process and how we plan to use these lessons to improve our program. Recognizing that there will be much interest among our sister programs in how we navigated the uncharted sea of EC2000, I hope that our experience will prove useful to them as they equip their ships for this exciting new voyage.

1. Introduction

In this paper I seek to provide a brief account of our experiences during the review of Northwestern University’s undergraduate program under EC2000. The objective is to provide some ideas that might prove useful to our colleagues at other institutions as they prepare their biomedical engineering programs to face the new process of accreditation.

2. Preparations for the review

The Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Northwestern University has a long history of surveying its constituents and using the results of these surveys to improve its educational programs. Hence, as we migrated from accreditation under the old ABET rules to accreditation under EC2000, we had a number of mechanisms in place and examples to cite for how feedback from constituents had been used to improve the educational outcomes of our program. This made the transition from the old ABET practices to EC2000 relatively easy. Significantly, we had made a revolutionary change in our curriculum at the school-wide level since our previous ABET review, and this change was motivated by feedback received from some of our constituents. The change entailed a new sequence of courses for first year engineering students where engineering analysis and design were integrated with math, physics

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Troy, J. B. (2000, June), Ec2000: Lessons Learned During Review Of A Biomedical Engineering Undergraduate Program Paper presented at 2000 Annual Conference, St. Louis, Missouri. 10.18260/1-2--8322