Development of an “S.M.A.R.T.” Assessment System for Accreditation and Continuous Program Improvement

Development and implementation of an educational program in engineering or technology is not something new to Colleges and Universities; however periodic assessment of a program for the purpose of accreditation by ABET as well as to demonstrate the continuous improvement remains a challenge for most of the programs. The design of a successful assessment system is open ended similar to any engineering design problem. In addition to that, the design guidelines are not well defined resulting in difficulties to develop an effective assessment system. There is a need for a framework to develop a good assessment system for program evaluation. An emphasis is given in this paper to explore such a framework. Assessment based on SMART system is suggested as a viable system with S – Sustainable Process; M – Measurable Performance Criteria; A – Actionable Feedback; R – Robust Methods; and T – Team Work of Constituents.