Accreditation criteria of engineering curriculum in Australia, USA and India: the role of non technical subjects

The curriculum design of engineering courses has become challenging in 21st century. This is mainly due to pressure of inclusion of vast amount of technical knowledge which is doubling every 10 years, therefore, curriculum designers often find difficult to incorporate the required discipline knowledge in a four year engineering curriculum. On the other hand there is an ever increasing demand of inclusion of non- technical subjects such as humanities, social sciences, communication and languages. This has become contentious issue as up to what extent the non - engineering courses should be incorporated into engineering curriculum. This paper explores the guiding factors and constraints under which a balance between technical and non-technical subjects is achieved in engineering curriculum in Australia, USA and India. As a case study, mechanical engineering curriculum at MIT (USA), QUT (Australia) and IIT Madras (India) have been analysed. It is concluded that quality and quantity of non technical subjects needs to be strengthened to face the complex challenges of this century