Assessment: How to Make Lemons into Lemonade

Higher education is being forced to make do with less money and to document how these limited funds are being spent. State legislatures have directed higher education to develop guidelines for assessing the student development and curriculum. Those programs that can document wise and efficient use of limited state funds in their assessment plans and reports will be in the best position to receive more funding or to continue to receive funds. Many engineering departments will see the implementation of a mandatory assessment program as one more lemon in a long line of useless administrative mandates that require many hours to fulfill and return no benefit to the department. This need not be the case. Engineering departments have in place the key parts of a three‐element assessment program: (1) The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology accreditation process; (2) the professional licensing process using the Fundamentals of Engineering exam; and (3) surveys of recent graduates and the employers of those recent graduates.