Development of course assessment metrics to measure program outcomes against ABET criteria in a digital circuits class

The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) [5] documentation lists all essential criteria for Engineering Technology and Engineering programs to obtain pertinent accreditation. However, ABET does not specify any methodology or rubric on how to appropriately determine when achievement of a criterion has been met. Hence, each individual Engineering Technology and Engineering program must establish its own program objectives and corresponding program outcomes, ensuring coverage of all ABET criteria. Then, each program must establish a systematic way of demonstrating that its objectives and outcomes are being met, therefore meeting the ABET criteria as well. One way of doing this is incorporating the assessment into various (or all) courses in the program, a process tested and introduced by the authors in [1]. In that paper a holistic approach was used to meet ABET criteria based on course assessment. However, the details on how to exactly incorporate assessment into each course were omitted. In this paper, we describe the process followed to generate assessment data from a Digital Circuits introductory course. These data connects course objectives into program outcomes based on the approach introduced in [1]. The paper shows how traditional student work, such as homework, exams, labs, quizzes, and projects, is used systematically to provide a solid framework for assessment and continuous improvement. Further, the data is used for meeting ABET criteria.