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Hello and welcome to another episode of Undercooled and Materials Education Podcast. Today we have a special guest. We have my friend Jeff Fergus from Auburn University who knows more about ABET than anyone else in the entire world that I know. And so we're going to be talking all about ABET today. But first, Jeff, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? Sure. So glad to be here. So I'm originally from Illinois.
Went to University of Illinois and the University of Pennsylvania, which is where I first met Steve. Did a post-doc at Notre Dame and had been at Auburn ever since. I came here in 92, so I've been here for 31 years. My research area is generally kind of high temperature chemistry, electrochemistry, batteries, fuel cells, things like that. But been in the dean's office about 10 years in two different associate dean roles. First was program assessment and graduate studies.
And now I moved over to undergraduate studies and program assessment. So that's a little bit about me. Tim? Awesome. Well, with that background, of course, the theme of today's show is ABET. So can you first actually just tell us a little bit about what is ABET? There may be people in the audience who don't know. And then how are you personally involved in the program? Sure. So ABET's a confederation of professional societies.
There's 35 professional societies that have basically come together to establish criteria to prepare programs, to evaluate programs to prepare students in areas, engineering, computing, engineering technology, applied and natural sciences. And so the purpose is to set these criteria that programs can develop programs so that they can prepare their students to be prepared, be ready to mentor the profession. I've been involved with ABET as a volunteer for about 20 years or so.
As a program evaluator, I served on the commission. There are four different commissions in ABET in the different technical areas. So engineering is the largest of those. Engineering technology is another, computing and applied and natural sciences. So I served on that commission. I moved into the executive committee, also then into the officer change. So I was the chair of the commission in 2019-20. And since I've also worked on training.
So I'm a facilitator for the training programs used to train program evaluators. And I'm now a lead facilitator for that. Been doing that for I think since about 2011 or so. And currently I'm the chair of the training committee of the Accreditation Council. So the Accreditation Council is a committee that represents the four different commissions. Some of the things that ABET does are specific to the different commissions and some are common across the four commissions.
And when things are common, then this body is the one that kind of coordinates so that those can be done. And things can be accomplished for all four commissions. And so that council has a training committee. And that training committee is the body that prepares the training, organizes the training for, mostly for program evaluators, but also some of the team chair training that's common among the commissions. That's great. And so ABET's been around, I believe, since 1930 something.
Is that right? And under different names, reinvented themselves multiple times. Two times since I've been around since around 1998 when they started doing the outcomes assessment based approach. And then I believe it was another, I don't remember how many years when they redid the student outcomes pretty dramatically going from A through K to one through seven. So ABET is always asking programs to do continuous improvement.
And I think ABET's been practicing continuous improvement for quite some time. That said, why should, you know, this is a podcast about materials education. So our prime audience are the materials programs in the United States and around the globe. I believe there's something like 125 materials programs, something plus or minus five programs, which is a lot. Why should materials programs care about ABET? Why are we involved with ABET?
So there's a first kind of a practical reason that many entities look for ABET accreditation when they're looking for engineers. In particular, if licensing is involved, most of the jurisdictions for licensing of engineers require a degree from an ABET accredited program. Now, many materials engineers don't need that licensing, but there are some areas where it is important.
For example, if you're going to go into consulting and say failure analysis, it's very important to have that professional engineering license. So that's kind of a practical reason. And many companies or other entities, when they're hiring, they'll put that as a requirement for the degree or preference, if not a requirement.
So those are kind of practical reasons, but it really the process involved, although it sometimes may seem tedious and parts of it may not seem clear why they're important, that process of evaluating your program, looking at it to see what you can do better, is going to help you improve that program and better prepare your students. So I think when you really understand what's required from ABET, it's not as hard as sometimes people might think when you really understand.
And if you do it in the right way, it can actually be a benefit and really help you improve your program. So I think it's really about, and that's the reason I'm involved, if it were just about checking a box for a licensure, I'm not sure I would have spent all the hours I have on it. But when it's really about trying to improve the preparation we're providing for our students, that's really what I think is important about it.
I completely agree. It's so valuable to be able to say not just, hey, let's keep doing what we've always been doing, but to say, what can we do better so that our students are more successful and more prepared to make a difference in the world? Absolutely. So on the receiving side of things, as an educator at an ABET accredited institution, I'm often interacting with these criteria, the accreditation criteria.
And so this makes me curious about where do the criteria come from, what are they specifically and what are the criteria that ABET is using to accreditate programs? So maybe I'll start with where they come from. As I mentioned, ABET is a confederation of professional societies. And so it really is us. It's all the different professional societies have representatives on the commission. It's the commission that decides what those criteria are.
It's the commission that creates the teams that go out and evaluate programs. And it's a commission that decides whether or not they're compliant. So it is people from our different professional societies that determine what those criteria should be. And that's important to keep in mind that when we complain about ABET requires this or that and may not agree with it, ABET's not this.
There is an office in Baltimore that has 30 or 40 staff members, but they're really there just to manage the process. The decisions are made by representatives from all our professional societies. Now, those different professional societies have different interests and priorities. And so there is some negotiation that has to go into that. It has to apply to all these different types of institutions, types of programs.
And so sometimes it can be the language can be a little bit vague because it's got to fit many different instances, which which takes some judgment and some understanding of them. So that's kind of where it comes from. The criteria in terms of what they are, there are eight what we call general criteria. And those are the criteria that apply to all programs. So the way I think of them at the top, you have what are called program educational objectives.
And these are what the program expects its graduates to be attaining a few years after graduation. So it's kind of your North Star. What are you trying to do? And the program needs to determine those with involving its constituencies, whoever they determine those to be, which is typically employers and alumni, people like that. And I think that's one of the real benefits of the impacts of the change that Steve mentioned that occurred around 2000.
And that is that's forced programs to really engage more with their alumni and their employers to get feedback on what they should be doing. So then below that, it's how do you get there? And the first step is what are called the student outcomes. These are skills and knowledges that that you expect your graduates to demonstrate before they graduate so that they can then attain those objectives that you've identified.
Those, again, had to be determined and agreed to by all these different societies. And one of the improvements that Steve was referring to is actually has has roots in material in our materials community. The the outcomes that were set back in probably late 1990s had been around for a long time.
And Beth Judson, who is from the American Ceramic Society, was then on the executive committee and she said, well, we've been we ask our programs to always speak improving, so we should be doing that, too. So let's re look at these outcomes and that she kind of started that process back in, I think, was about 2009, 2010. Sometimes in that time frame. And it finally took 10 years or so before they they were changed. And it took a long time to come to agreement as to what they should be.
I think they were an improvement. So there is that trying to make it better, try to adapt to these changes. So that's the outcomes. And then to support all that are basically the things that the institution or the program needs to do. Students, what are your processes for advising and making sure that students meet all the graduation requirements? What is the curriculum? What is the content of the courses they take?
What's their experiences that they need to go through before they can for they graduate? Are your faculty qualified? Do you have enough faculty? Are the facilities adequate to support those student outcomes? Do you have the the the institutional support, financial and administrative to support the program? And then on top of all this, there's that requirement for a continuous improvement.
So you have to have a process by which you're determining are your students meeting the outcomes that that have been specified and looking at other other data to see how how are you doing and what can you do to improve? And you need a document that you're continuing that process. Most of the most of what the evaluators are looking for are related to processes. And processes are important. Sometimes it might say, well, it's kind of a bureaucratic thing, but processes are what keep things going.
If you don't have a process established, then if people change, you might not keep doing what you're doing. But if there's a process that helps make sure that people are doing things in a certain way, it's being consistent and not letting things fall through the crack. And that's really mostly what what the team is looking for. Do you have these processes? How are they working? Are they documented? Yeah, that's well said. I think that's exactly captures what a bet tries to do.
And it's always distressing to me how so many faculty and even many administrators misinterpret what a bet trying to do. I can't tell you how many meetings I've been in where someone says, oh, we can't teach that in our class because a bet won't let us. And it's like, no, a bet doesn't say anything about what we actually teach. There's no curricular mandates by a bet other than it be a engineering course or a math science course. There's 30 credits of math and science,
45 credits of engineering. That's it. And there are clear definitions in the criteria that explain the difference between those two words. And that's it. They don't dictate the content, the pedagogy, the kinds of courses that's totally up to a program as long as the student outcomes are being assessed. And they don't even have to be met. Right. The criteria doesn't say the students have to meet the outcomes.
It only says that you have to measure the extent to which the graduates have achieved those outcomes. And everything, the processes, everything is up to the programs. A bet does not dictate any of that. And I think it's all encapsulated really nicely with something. Was it Chet Van Tyne who started saying the phrase, improve your program for yourselves first and worry about a bet later. If you're a good program, meeting the criteria for a bet should be trivial.
You just have to document things and have a process where you actually look at it. And the details are already being done because you care about your students. That's been my experience as well, tangentially working with some of these things is looking at the criteria, looking at the outcomes and really saying, this is what I should be doing all along anyway, right? You just want to make sure that I'm actually doing a good job.
It doesn't really seem so onerous if, as you said, Steve, if you're trying to make your program better for yourself and for your students, the A-bet process will happen naturally as a consequence of that. Yeah, and there's an analogy for that. You know, if you give a question on a test that requires maybe a sentence or two to answer and the students who know the answer will answer it in a sentence or two.
And those that don't will fill every little spot on the paper with words hoping that you will find the answer in what they've written. And it's kind of the same thing you'll see with a program that doesn't really know what's required. They just do a lot of stuff hoping it's the right thing. And if you understand what is really required, as Steve said, it's really not that hard to meet the criteria. You have to document some things, you have to do some things.
But if you're just interested in getting your making your program better, it's not that much work if you know what work is required. Part of this, maybe you can you probably know the history better than I do, but EC2000, when A-bet started the outcomes assessment based accreditation, which was a big shift for them at that time. I believe that was born out of ISO 9000. Is that correct? I it sounds it sounds like it would be to me. I don't I wasn't around at that time, so I'm not sure.
But so I think that's likely you haven't said this, but industry is pretty involved with A-bet as well. And I because I first got in when our program was going to be evaluated in 1999, I think under the EC2000. That was the Engineering Commission 2000 project has changed the way A-bet did things. We agreed to do it then. And lucky me, I got sucked into being the one who had to do the self study. And so that was my initiation.
And, you know, it was explained to us that in factories, people always make measurements to make sure the product that comes out at the end of the line is a quality product. And so they had all sorts of metrics involved. And this was pretty much done universally in all industry. So they were saying, why don't you do the same for education?
And while I think that's a great idea and I think it's it's come a long way, I really do have to always say measuring a part in a factory is a lot easier than measuring student outcomes. And I think that there has to be some give by industry. And I saw this on teams where the industrial evaluators didn't quite get that and they were always much pickier than the academic evaluators.
Yeah, sometimes although they also they get the continuous improvement part more easily than some of the academics, I mean, they get the idea that, oh, yes, you do need to. It's about the improvement as opposed to sometimes, at least in the beginning stages, I guess, I think we've gotten better at it. But in the in the beginnings, we as professors didn't quite get it. I think it took us a little while to understand that we have we are assessing.
It's just where we give tests, we know we give homeworks, we have them do things to assess. We don't think of it that way. So I think it would be useful. Maybe you can tell us go through the whole A-bet process, because a lot of programs out there, you know, it's one of these things I've been doing it at my school for a long time and helping the dean much as like you've done.
And what's remarkable to me is that every six years, the chairs are all completely different and none of them have experience. And so it's reinventing the wheel every single time you do it, which is why process is so important. So, in case there are programs out there that are listening to this to try to figure out, oh, my God, we have to do a bit. I have no idea how to do it. Can you go through how the whole process begins every six years? And so people understand that.
Sure. So A-bet comes at the invitation of the institution. No program has to be accredited by A-bet. And so it's an invitation. And that invitation is done through what's called a request for evaluation. That's done in January of the year preceding when your onsite evaluation will be. So if you were to be evaluated, say it's too late for fall 2024, so you could be evaluated in fall 2025.
In that case, in January of 2025, you would submit a request for evaluation, which will just list these other programs you want to have evaluated. You provide one example transcript because they need to see how the degree is described on the transcript to make sure the name is correct and consistent and so forth. So then you just wait. And the next step is the team chair is assigned to the evaluations. That occurs typically around this time.
So they're in the process right now of probably assigning team chairs. The team chairs are commissioners, either active commissioners or what we call the team chair pool, which are commissioners who have been off the commission for a few years and are still familiar enough that they can still lead a team. And so they're assigned typically in late April, May, that time frame. Once the team chair is assigned, then the evaluation date is set.
And actually, for the last several years, when you submit your request for evaluation, you can at that time request a date. You can say this is the date when we want to have our evaluation. And in most cases, that that is accomplished. Some cases it may not work out, but usually it does. So once the team chair is established, they confirm the date, the date set, then the rest of the team is is assigned. The program evaluators are assigned by the professional societies.
So in the case of materials programs, the program evaluators are assigned by TMS. The only exception would be ceramics programs are assigned by the American Ceramics Society. And all the different disciplines will assign teams to all the different programs. So that's what's that's happening in terms of preparing for the visit. Now, in the meantime, the program needs to provide a prepare a self-study report. That's due in July, July 1st of the summer before the visit.
Now, you would have already been should have already has been working on that for a while when we prepared for our so we were visited about a year before last. We started essentially really preparing about a year before the self-study is due. Basically, the after that previous academic year, you have that academic year completed, your processes, most of the self-study report isn't going to change very much at that point. So you can really write the vast majority of the report.
I coordinated that so far. The last two visits, I coordinated that for our college and I asked for drafts by actually January, even though it's not due to July. And my argument was, well, if you submit it in January, you have a draft and we find an issue, you got the spring to fix it and turn it from a problem to an example of a continuous improvement. And some of the programs, well, nobody disagreed with that. Some of them complied, some of them did not, but that's that's their choice.
So the preparation is take some time to prepare that document on that document basically describes how you comply with all the different criteria. There are some kind of bookkeeping type things that collecting resumes and collecting syllabi, which could be a bit time consuming. So starting on that early is a good way to not have it all concentrated in June. So now we have the team is set in July and the self-study report submitted.
And then that team starts to work with the institution to prepare for the visit. The visits occur typically in the fall from usually the earliest or maybe the week after Labor Day. And they go until most are the highest concentrations October. They go into November or maybe a few in December. And then the team can even before the visit, the team is encouraged to interact with the institution. So the program evaluator will read the self-study might have some questions.
If the PV doesn't have questions, it probably means they're not really doing their job. There's always something that's not clear, some additional information. So if you get questions, don't worry about that. In fact, I would think that's a good thing that you're getting. You're finding out what issues that might be there and you have a chance to address it even before the visit in many cases.
Or if not, at least be prepared to provide the evidence on site that you might need to demonstrate compliance. So that all occurs up until the visit. The typical visits are the kind of standard is starts on a Sunday. Sunday morning, the team meets, comes on campus in the afternoon, looks at facilities, reviews, materials, which are course materials and assessment materials you've collected. That's changing now. That's a lot of that might be available in advance.
So there's some discussion of how that Monday might look a little bit different. If you've already evaluated some of those materials, that's the traditional purpose of that Sunday. And then most of the meetings are on Monday. So Monday is just a day full of meetings from the program. So each the team consists of a team chair and then program evaluators where there's one program evaluator for each program.
Exceptions might be if a program has a name that has two that requires two program criteria. And one thing I forgot to mention when I was talking about criteria in a division in addition to those eight general criteria, there are what are called program criteria and those are specific to the different disciplines. So materials engineering and material science and engineering has one set of program criteria which are different from aerospace engineering or mechanical engineering.
And those program criteria describe either curricular topics or faculty qualifications that are needed for that discipline that are necessarily needed for a general any engineer program. So you're preparing so that each program has one or maybe two if they have a name like that.
Sometimes there are other members of the team like observers who are part of the training are just tagging along and observing or from state boards or various types of observers that can be part of the team but aren't part of the evaluation decision. So that you'll meet with your program evaluator will want to meet with the chair will want to be with faculty with students. And so you'll work with the program evaluators schedule that that day of meetings. There's typically a luncheon where the.
That you're allowed to host the team and typically use that to have some alumni or maybe some star students to meet with this. Be with the PV. You always want to get your best students to have lunch with the PV because that gives a very good impression that you have these very bright students and successful alumni.
And then the visit goes till Tuesday. So on Tuesday the morning there's typically not any meetings it's meant for preparation of the report and for any pickup meetings that might be needed. So the team prepares a report a Sunday or Tuesday afternoon they'll read that report. First they'll debrief the the program chair just to talk through it and then they have a formal reading for with the president provost.
Really whoever the institution wants to have their anything from just the president provost and the team to inviting all the faculty and that had everything in between. And so at the end of the visit the team will read this report. This is what's called the draft statement. And you're not given a written draft statement which you are given is a written program audit form and that program audit form will have a description of any shortcomings that were identified.
So you have a written version of those shortcomings to see and work on if there are issues to be addressed and you can immediately start working on those. You don't have to wait for the rest of the process. So the rest of the process is first you have seven days to say if there's any mistakes in that what was read. But that's really just errors of fact. It's not we disagree with this or we've done this additional work. It's just that was wrong. You said we have 15 faculty. We really
have 16 or something like that. And then it goes through an editing process. And this editing is not just language. It's it's really about content and interpretation and judgment. So the first level it goes to. And there's two letters two levels of editor editors editors one editors two editors one are members of the executive committee of the commission. I think EAC now has about 20 of those 20 21 maybe something like that. So all the AC will probably be evaluating seven 800 different programs.
So it's a lot. So those are divided among those 20 people. So they'll read it and come back. They may have some questions. But why was this done this way. What did you really see here. You know this doesn't look like what we typically do. So what they're really looking for is trying to make everything consistent among all the different teams that are going out because those couple hundred teams are going to all different institutions with different people.
Hundreds of different people all trying to make a consistent decision. And that's a that's a challenge. We have training to try to do that. But training is not going to cover it all. So you have this process to have checks of people who have seen more have more experience and can help them to make things similar at different institutions. Then the second level of editing are the officers. And now in the AC its officers plus one or two more.
And they're looking at even more programs and they're they have more experience and they may go back and forth with some discussion of what this should be. And then finally it goes to what are called the adjuncts and the adjuncts are part time a bet staff. AC has four of them. All four of those have been chairs of the commission and now they work part time for a bet that they don't make the decisions but they provide guidance.
And because they have even more experience and we'll ask questions and go back and forth. So it goes through all of this process before you finally have what's called the draft statement. This takes a couple of months typically. That draft statement will may look a little different than what was read. Some of the shortcomings might have changed in level. Some might have gone away. So that's based on the judgment and what what what's typically done at different institutions.
Then that draft statement comes back to the institution. And at that point the program has 30 days to respond. What's called 30 day response at that point. Then you can provide well we have changed this in this way or provide a different additional information. Talk about what you're planning to do to address a shortcoming because sometimes maybe it's not ready yet. But you still have to respond within 30 days.
Now if there is information that is needed afterwards you can request to submit what's called post 30 days post post 30 day information. And that can typically be provided until about May 15th or May 30th. And it's at the discretion of the team chair but any team chair is going to accept anything that's reasonable in a reasonable time. So there'll be an agreement that we're going to provide this information by May 15th or whatever the agreed upon day is.
That would be things like say you're changing your assessment processes and you want some assessment data from the spring semester. So obviously you may not have that when you have to provide your response. That's a perfectly legitimate request or capstone projects. We were missing some aspect of the capstone experience. So we need to provide this is what we've done. This is how we change the course.
And in May we will provide the actual report so you can see that what we did was actually accomplished. Then once that's that that goes through that whole same editing process again. So the response is evaluated just like the initial report. And that's the report that goes to the commission. The commission meets in July typically about second third week in July.
So they have this all these reports and they're they're going to make the vote on these whether they whatever that recommendation is for accreditation. The in addition to all these other checks there's a what's called a consistency committee. So that's a committee that's assigned. They look at all of the reports and try to look for anything that might not be consistent. Like there's all these two situations look kind of similar. This one's a weakness. This is a concern.
And they'll ask the commission to take a look at it. The commission evaluates these in panels so that they're divided into smaller groups so that each group has about probably about 10 or 12. Institutions to look at which might be 40 or 50 programs. And so looking at a smaller subset of this these hundreds of programs and they'll discuss and make sure that yes this looks like it's the right thing or not. Then that goes to the commission.
The other thing is all of the professional societies have representatives there. And those professional societies will look at reports from their programs. So the TMS and the Trammell Society group. We get together and we look at all the materials programs and look at this doesn't look right to us and we can go and raise an issue or we can go talk to the team chair and and address something if we think something doesn't look quite right.
And then the commission will finally vote and vote on some accreditation action. And so those actions the one you want is what's called the next general review. And that means you don't have to do anything in terms of formal reporting until your next review which is six years later or really five years by then. By the time you get to this this because this is already the summer following your visit. Then there's also interim actions which can either be an interim report or interim visit.
Those are in two years. And those those the depends on the different shortcomings and whether it's a report or visit kind of depends on the nature of whether it's something that can be reported a document or needs to be observed. Or the or there's another type of interim is a show cause which is more serious that it could lead to loss of accreditation after that. It's just when you have a deficiency as opposed to weaknesses would be for just to enter and visit.
And so that decision is made and then it's communicated to the program or the institution directly from a bet typically in August August or maybe into September. They after the meeting they have to make sure everything's correct and takes a little bit of time to do that. So it's a long process. It's going on two years. In addition to that if it's the first time there's a program from an institution there's what's called a readiness review which occurs before that request for evaluation.
And the purpose of that is it's submitting a kind of a poor part of a self study and it's really just to make sure that the program kind of understands what they're getting into. And then there's a recommendation from that that said yes looks like you're ready to go or no we don't think you are but it's not binding the program can go ahead and institution can go ahead and even if it's recommended to not try they can still go ahead.
It's just a recommendation that we think you don't quite understand what you know what you're up up against. So maybe you should wait or the program's not quite ready or you don't really understand. So that's the process. It's about a two year almost a two year process to get through. Thank you. And obviously the goal of a program is to have no shortcomings at that final exit meeting because that means you have an NGR. There's nothing to complain about.
I think it's really important for programs to realize it's really important that they think deeply about whether or not they're going to be compliant the summer before the visit. And to be really honest with the evaluator and accept what the evaluator tells them way back in the summer before the visit because good evaluators will let programs know early if they think there might be a problem especially these days when the resource room is all in Dropbox or Box.com or something like that.
So there's you know except for meeting with all the people and seeing the facilities. Ninety five percent of the visit should be done before the evaluator even gets there. And that's important because if a program gets early warning that they haven't been doing continuous improvement. They haven't been documenting things all of that. They can start in the fall term and make sure that they've done everything that they need to do to demonstrate that they're now compliant.
So when the draft statement comes to them they're in very very good shape to make sure those shortcomings are removed. And I can't emphasize that enough for any program going through. So if you just you know even if you're in trouble you know you should do it Jeff suggested have yourself study written in January before you're going to be evaluated the following fall because that gives you the winter term or spring term to get ready.
And even if that doesn't work even if you get shortcomings you have the whole fall term. But if you just sit there and wait and take it and your evaluation happens to be in November boy you're in a tough spot. And so don't let yourself get in that spot. That's that's my personal advice. And I would say the most shortcomings are resolved most can be and many are. So if you do get a shortcoming at the visit. Obviously it'd be nice if you can avoid that as Steve describes.
But even if you if there is still something there you have time and most of the shortcomings in my experience do get resolved or at least reduced to the level where they don't affect accreditation the action. So don't get discouraged if you do get something. There's time and that that's the goal is that everyone is compliant. It's not the goal to see how many shortcomings we can ring up. It's we want the we want to confirm that the program is compliant. And if not can we help them get there.
You know that's the perfect lead to the next question that I wanted to ask which is what advice do you have for programs to help them be more successful. What can they do to learn about these processes. Where can they go. Is there training they can do. And how can they make sure they have a successful visit. To me the best way to learn is to become a program evaluator. You learn so much. I mean it's just like if you're writing a proposal to NSF. What do you do to prepare for that.
You serve on a panel. So you serve on a panel and you say oh now I see what kills a proposal and I know now I see why that proposal it's it's it's it's stood out. And this is what made it stand out. It's it's the same. And as I mentioned before once you understand what's required it's really not that hard. Now that does that is a commitment because it I would estimate it probably takes a maybe a week of your time. If you do one visit per year which is kind of typical of a P.E.V.
Maybe a week of your time over the travel the preparation and it varies a lot. It gets shorter as you get more experience. I'm accurate a self study much faster than I could when I started. But it is a commitment. There's no cost. It pays for all your costs. Of course your time is cost but no out of pocket costs. That's the best way I think. But there are other opportunities. TMS training that we have for program evaluators. We allow other people to come just to learn. That's how I got involved.
I was I was going to be in charge of the next review for my program. And TMS had the P.E.V. training and they said anyone can come. So I went thought I might have to learn about this and they said well do you want to be a P.E.V. I guess I guess I'll learn more if I do that. So I did and and I kept with it. And I find it very rewarding to do. But it is a bit of a commitment. So that's not for everybody but that would be the best. But there are other ways to learn.
There is a bit symposium this way. There are other ABET has other training programs to help to train people in understanding these these criteria. We have a workshop or a symposium every year. It's been at at the fall meeting until but this next year is not going to be this fall. We moved it to the annual meeting. So it'll be in the 2025 TMS annual meeting. It's called the Judson symposium.
It's named after Beth Judson who I mentioned earlier was the one who started the reevaluation of the student outcomes and she unfortunately was killed in a plane crash about the year after she started that. So we named the symposium in honor of her. And in fact getting I think one of you mentioned earlier about just doing the right thing and a credential come along the way.
The original name of the symposium was continuous improvement of academic programs and then in parentheses and satisfying ABET along the way. We wanted to put ABET in there to get people's attention because ABET does get attention. But we didn't want it to be just this is about ABET. It is but it's really about how do you improve your program. Yes you do need to look and see well what does ABET require and just make sure you have those things.
But I think you find if you if you're just trying to improve your program the things you have to add are probably pretty minimal and some of them might even help you to do what you were doing better particularly things with documentation and things like that. So that's in TMS we have that opportunity. I think other professional societies have similar types of programs where they have committees that are working on this and trying to help their programs as well.
That's great and to reinforce that even more the Judson Symposium that used to really be all about from the accreditation committee has now joined forces with the education committee and it's a joint meeting. And Tim and I are both on the education committee now and that's where this whole idea for the podcast actually came from. So it's very appropriate we're talking to you since you've been very involved in the Judson committee symposium for a long time.
So you already mentioned that ABET is continuously improving. Where is it going now? What's next for ABET? Yeah so there I mean there are a number of areas that are kind of hot topics. Probably one of the biggest one right now is DEI. And I was happy when I was a chair we actually approved some changes to the criteria to incorporate DEI. And ABET had been trying to do this a while.
They first worked on kind of the overall statements of the organization and those all fine but really where the impact is going to be is if it's in the criteria where programs have to do something. That's where I think we're going to really have impact. So they asked all the commissions to try to put DEI related topics into the criteria.
And so we this was so this is 2019-20 and they had asked that and so I was a chair at the time and so I kept on our criterion committee to make sure they kept working on this. And they did and they came up with proposals in four different criteria to have changes. And happy that we did this even though this was COVID. So we were also dealing with how to transition all of the visits to virtual. So it was a it was a hectic year but we did pass those.
And so I was really pleased with that and it's been a while the so after the commission approves that it has to be approved by another body called the engineering area delegation. So ABET used to have a board of like 55 people and a board of 55 people cannot function. No absolutely not.
And the reason it was so big is because ABET is has representatives all these professional societies and you have to give them representation and you have to have a little bit different representation for the ones that have more programs and so it was a big body. And so they reorganized so they now have a small board of I think 13 people but they still have the area delegation or the well the area delegation are for the different commissions and the board of delegates is all of those together.
And that's where the representation comes. So TMS has a representative on the engineering area delegation and the board of delegates. And that's the body that has to then approve.
Well they didn't want to approve it they wanted to they kind of kicked it down the road went through talking about it for a while and tried again and finally a year later it did approve did get approved two of the four because of the of the criteria there's eight criteria of those five are what's called harmonized which means they're the same for all four commissions. So anything that changes and knows has to be agreed on by all four commissions which is can be a challenge.
The other three are commission specific so we can EAC could pass those. So two of them those two passed the other two they passed the commission but then they got stopped by the accreditation council because none of the other commissions were ready. So the other two got through and they were in criterion five and criterion six. So criterion five is curriculum and criterion six is faculty. And so it went through it took a couple years to finally get them approved.
And now they're still not approved but they are they have approved a pilot study that pilot study we're going into the second year of the pilot study. And so the idea there is we'll go through the pilot study kind of learn how is this being valid how are people responding how are they how are they saying they're compliant how are we going to judge that how are we going to train people to evaluate that so there's some issues that have to be worked out and that's kind of what we're
trying to do these these couple years. So that's that's the in process the essence of those additions are essentially I mean you're designing things well I should say it mentions that you have to have DEI in the professional context and to me that's the important part it's not just oh you need to go to a DEI seminar and learn about diversity, equity, and inclusion. How is that important for engineering?
And obviously it is I mean to me the two ways it stands out is one is you have to work with different people you have to understand how
to do that and do that effectively. And secondly probably with even the bigger impact is you're designing whether it's materials or products or processes for a lot of different people and if you don't understand and don't have perspectives from different people your market share is going to be people just like you right and if you're going to really just to be effective even getting setting aside the social justice aspects of it just talking about the business case for
the diversity is you're going to have a product that is is more useful for more people. And so that's kind of to me the essence of what I think is appropriate to put in a engineering criteria because that is important to be a successful engineer. And of course for the faculty it's about understanding those concepts I would say so you can support that education.
So that's going through this pilot study I'm hopeful that it will you know it may be tweaked a little bit because as as we in the first year of this self the first year of the pilot study what happened was a lot so that was optional and any program could decide to do it or not it had absolutely no bearing on the evaluation it was evaluated not even by the team it was evaluated by a separate group of people that just evaluated
that. So there's no risk and some programs did I think it ended up being maybe 40 institutions said they would and maybe 20 some actually did something on that order. What they found was they the programs often just talked about what they did in DI but didn't really address the criteria and how they were compliant
with those words. So in the second year they changed the prompt so there's a like an addendum to the cell study if you're if you're going to participate to really try to make that more clear that you really have to demonstrate how are you doing what we've described here. And so I'm going to be working with a task group to look at that and also start thinking about what are we looking for in terms of their criteria and how are you going to train our our teams to be able to look
at that and interpret that. So that to me that's the biggest thing that's on the horizon. There's also there's DEI coming in different areas too. There's a proposal coming through in the institutional support with some kind of general DEI related language. The kind of language that's in there now is the kind of thing that all institutions are doing just because of
federal law. So I'm not sure that that's going to be as impactful but I think in criterion five where you're talking about in that experience in that design experience how are you preparing your students in the context considering equity and so forth when you're designing that's going to make better engineers and if every program has to every six years explain how are they doing that that's I think that's I think that'll really move the needle more than a lot of other things that we
we do need to do the other things but I think this is really impact. Totally agree with you. Are you at all concerned about the new politics of DEI and DEI anti-DEI legislation and now I believe Congress is proposing to write a law specifically talking about accreditation bodies. So how is ABET responding to this?
ABET's very cognizant of that and they're looking at it and they're looking at the laws and they don't want to put in it they don't want to they don't want to not do this I think ABET I mean I know I know enough of the people in the leadership and so forth I think they are committed to doing this and they're going to find find a way to do it but they don't want to put a program in in the position where if they want to be accredited they're going to lose state funding
I mean they don't want to do that so
they'll look at a way to do that. I'm experienced that we had a legislation passed a couple weeks ago here and when you read it first it looks like we're in trouble but actually ours fortunately related accreditation does have a clause that says you know if you have to do something because of accreditation you're excluded from this so we're okay and at this point but it's going to take I think it's going to be a lot of um a lot of it is the words and those words are
triggering and in our areas we're stopping we're not using DEI as much of course I'm in Alabama where it's a little bit different than Michigan but we we so we try to describe the things without using the triggering words you can because what you do it's not as people don't really object to the things you might do they object to those words that they have some other connotation of what you're really talking about so some of it's going to be trying to describe things in a different way
that accomplish what we want them to accomplish for example you talk about equitable design well you can talk about universal design in kind of doing the same things how do you make this design usable by more people well you're doing that for equity but if you call it equity then that may trigger some people so you might call it universal design you're also doing it for everybody so you're doing it for people who are introverts people who are extroverts people from different socio-economic
groups and it's everybody it's not absolutely particular group that gets you in trouble with politics absolutely yeah something else i'm really happy to hear about that approach is that it's about programs taking action not just saying i have this principle that i believe in i mean it's nice to believe in principles but if that's all you're doing is believing in a principle and not doing anything about it it's kind of like so what so the fact that you're saying what are you
doing to make your students more successful in you know being a part of this world that we're in together i'm really happy to hear that yeah in fact our legislation that was passed in alabama they um it it talks about the what they're really objecting to is forcing someone to believe something which we don't do that we teach this is the you know this is and this is how you design things this is why it's good but we don't say you have to believe in this principle which is what
they're kind of objecting to and some of the exclusions are the things like well if you're supporting students even if you're targeting a particular group that's okay if it's just about supporting students as long as you're not making limiting participation based on being in a group which we don't do you know so um yeah i agree and so it's when you think about well what do you need to do to accomplish what you might describe as your dei goals well what do you have to do to get
there you describe that and that that you're not going to get objection to so i think that's probably the way abet's going to have to do it they may have to change the language to not make it offensive but still force programs to think about those things and it's already in there i mean with the teams right we talked about work on diverse teams has been there for years and that's important and it's already in there but then the kind of the design part maybe it is in there too
but and communication to a range of audiences it's there too absolutely well jeff this has been fantastic thank you so much i want to mention that we're hosting the north american materials all the programs. outcomes assessment process, but some of those programs just thought it was done and they forgot to also document the continuous improvement of their program, which is really the whole point. And it's okay if measuring the assessing the outcomes.
It's a really important thing to do because it gives you great insight into whether or not you have a problem anywhere and need to address it. And one thing I've learned is by using all the data and having a histogram, I can't help but look at the little tick marks in the tails. Even though, yeah, we have, you know, 80% of our students are beyond our threshold, you see that tail and now I'm wondering, well, what about them?
And because we actually have all the data, the actual unique names, it's all secret. I can't see who they are, but we have it. And now we have a new AI tool that knows how to look into SQL databases. Again, our AI tool is private. It's completely FERPA compatible because we don't give any information to OpenAI or Microsoft or Google. We've licensed their tools, we pay for it, so that we can work on our curated dataset. Why not work on that? We have 6,000 students in our system now.
Maybe we can do small longitudinal studies with, you know, here are these people in the tails. How did they do in the other criteria? How did they do the next year they were assessed? And so I think this ABET process, although this is not explicitly part of ABET, it's allowing us to view our data in ways we probably never dreamed we'd be able to do. And it might be one of the advantages of artificial intelligence. It's certainly these large language models to figure out what's going on.
So we're kind of excited about this, but you still have to improve your program. And we do that with lots of other ways. Tim is creating a new math course for all of our sophomores. We had instituted a fifth math course in our curriculum, thinking it would help them learn the math they needed for the courses. And the students all waited until their last year, senior year to take it, which defeated the purpose. So we reevaluated.
Now we're going to offer it as a sophomore level course and cover, you know, complex variables or orthogonal series, eigenvalue problems, all this stuff that they don't really get in their calculus sequence. So these are all the things that good programs will always do to improve their program. And it never ends. We're constantly having to deal with it. So anyway, any final thoughts before we take off?
The only thing I guess I would say is, you know, I know people sometimes have issues with specific things that ABED does, but I think ideally the idea that someone's coming to look at your program and give you feedback should be a positive thing. And when we find that our program developers are not doing that, we either stop sending them or try to encourage them to follow that philosophy. But that really is what it should be, is meant to be.
And I think I'm still hopeful that we're moving closer to that. And I hope we look at it that way and try to work towards that would be what I like to do. All right. Well, thank you very much. And I think we'll sign off. So see you later. Excellent. Thanks so much. See you next time. Okay. Thank you.