ACAT: ABET Course Assessment Tool

Abstract

This thesis describes the ABET Course Assessment Tool (ACAT). This tool was designed and developed to assist faculty in producing course assessment reports for ABET accreditation. These reports demonstrate that students in the course are achieving the required outcomes. Documentation of this requirement is particularly burdensome. There is no standard method of generating these reports, and each institution handles it differently. This might involve manual collection of the data which is very time consuming. ACAT is a web based tool that allows users to input the data required for a course assessment and then produce a standardized report as a PDF document. The design and implementation of this process is covered, followed by a detailed look at the tool's operation. To validate the design and user interface, a usability study was conducted with Computer Science and Engineering faculty members. Results show that ACAT is a viable tool that streamlines the course assessment process and is an improvement over the existing manual process.