The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) has revised the accreditation criteria that are designed to assure that graduates of accredited programs are prepared to enter the practice of engineering and satisfy industrial requirements. The general criteria also specify that engineering programs must demonstrate that their graduates possess or satisfy eleven (11) educational outcomes generally known as “a” through “k.” This investigation suggests that graduating seniors in civil engineering believe their educational experience has given them a strong background in two of the outcomes required by ABET. These include: (1) an ability to apply knowledge of mathematics, science, and engineering; and (2) an ability to identify, formulate, and solve engineering problems. In contrast, three outcomes received slightly lower ratings from alumni practitioners and employers. These include, a knowledge of contemporary issues; the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global/societal context; and an ability to communicate effectively. Overall, the data may suggest that not all ABET educational attributes are considered by graduating seniors in civil engineering, employers, and industrial practitioners, to have the same level of significance and perhaps should not be stressed to the same degree in an engineering program. In this regard, it was found that the scores from a benchmarking study tend to be lower than those of students and practitioners educated at Lamar University Nevertheless, for comparative purposes, the findings of the investigation could be utilized by other institutions and departments that may wish to study and/or assess their curriculum and satisfy ABET criteria.

Hand-drawn sketches are still an important tool used by civil engineers to graphically communicate technical information. New engineers often have inadequate experience preparing sketches by hand to effectively communicate information graphically. As a result of using computer aided drafting and digital cameras in both engineering education and professional practice, hand-sketching skills are being overlooked. Practicing engineers from an earlier generation generally appreciate the importance of being able to quickly prepare sketches to communicate a concept to a client or to quickly gather and transmit information from field observations. With limited experience in hand sketching, current students may not see the benefits of such skills. To increase student graphical communication skills and develop an appreciation for hand sketching, opportunities to develop and practice hand-sketching skills can be incorporated within the undergraduate curriculum. Examples of hand-sketching exercises intended to help improve students’ graphical communication skills are presented.

Expansive soils are a serious geologic hazard in Texas; accordingly, one would expect Texas engineering colleges to offer a strong educational program on expansive soils at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. However, data from the geotechnical programs within the civil engineering departments of Texas engineering colleges suggest that while Texas educational programs cover the topic of expansive soils in varying degrees, the educational effort is highly skewed toward traditional geotechnical and foundation issues. In most cases, treatment of the expansive soil problem is limited and is not adequate when measured against the scope and extent of expansive soil problems in Texas.

Engineers are educated with significant technical depth in their chosen engineering discipline. Yet almost exclusively engineers work in teams made up of those educated in many different disciplines. And the design tasks that engineers face are becoming much more complex requiring engineers with a broader technical education to develop innovative solutions. Due to the increasing complexity of modern engineering projects, successful engineering leaders must have some degree of competence in more than one engineering field. Educators should recognize that modern engineers require this diversity in technical skills, and should identify in engineering courses the “connections” in topics that are common to more than a single discipline. In addition, engineering students should be required to work in multidisciplinary teams before they graduate.

This paper is concerned with the potential of accountability to improve the performance of public urban services. A number of assumptions are made in the literature relating to accountability; these concern the necessity of multiple strategies of accountability, information symmetries, sanctions, trust, homogeneous service users, community-level answerability, incentives, self-regarding behavior, and for users’ voice to be heard in service delivery. It is the purpose of this paper to reconsider these theoretical propositions for the functioning of accountability in light of practical experience from the United Kingdom, South Africa, Bangladesh, and South Korea. Each of these case studies was selected to illustrate a different form of accountability. The forms of accountability investigated in this research are professional, political, user, and managerial accountabilities. An assessment is made of whether accountability is demonstrated in these case studies in the way predicted by the literature. The empirical data demonstrate that factors like multiple strategies and information/resource symmetries are critical to accountability but that there is only partial evidence to support the need for sanctions, trust, incentives, self-interest, and user voice for effective service delivery. The research indicates the need for greater emphasis on the operation and maintenance of urban services and direct accountability to service users. However the assumption that service users are homogeneous is disputed. This paper concludes with a review of the practical implications of strengthening accountability as a means to improve the performance of urban services.

Our public schools face almost irresistible pressures to upgrade and expand facilities and deliver better, more advanced, and higher-quality education while tax revenues and therefore budgets are shrinking each year. Class sizes grow in old and outdated facilities, and municipalities and school districts have few resources to address the pressing space needs. There is little public support for increased funding. However, there is a way to deliver educational facilities that uses less public capital than traditional project finance. Public/Private Partnership (PPP) is a delivery method that has traditionally been used on large infrastructure projects in developing nations, in order to allow more development for less public capital investment while maintaining the overall quality of construction. In recent years, PPP has gained acceptance in Europe and now in the United States as a means of public school finance and construction. This paper discusses PPP, its fundamental principles, and the various ways it can be employed in the delivery of educational facilities, as well as its advantages and disadvantages.

With the advent of contracting methods in the construction industry that result in the owner compensating a contractor for “actual costs” as opposed to a lump-sum payment, the owner must protect its interest by taking on the responsibility of confirming amounts actually incurred by the contractor and determining if these amounts are allowable under the terms of the contract. To succeed at such an endeavor, an owner must have a general understanding of contract interpretation, the risk of not incorporating an express audit provision in its contract, and the implications of not implementing a real-time reporting structure. This paper sets forth the benefits of requiring a real-time reporting structure in the owner-contractor agreement.

In today’s world, construction projects require the collaboration of several parties who work independently for a shared purpose, sometimes across space and time, and most of the time across organizational boundaries. Working with a wide diversity of knowledge and skills brings a broad range of viewpoints and expertise to the construction projects. In design and construction, organizations depend on information technology to execute their specific well-defined tasks to make construction projects possible. Technology is used either for executing these tasks more efficiently, or for doing things that were not possible before. Nevertheless, despite the potential positive contribution of these tools to the design and construction processes and organizations, barriers still exist for achieving success. This paper presents potential benefits of technology enabled and open project team collaboration with a case study example and outlines cultural and legal barriers to its widespread adoption by the construction industry.