ABET Outcome Assessment and Improvement through the Capstone Design Course in an Industrial Engineering Curriculum

In this paper, for the capstone design course, we first show how we demonstrate that our IE majors attain the ABET outcome items (c) and (h) where (c) is an ability to design a system, component, or process to meet desired needs within realistic constraints such as economic, environmental, social, political, ethical, health and safety, manufacturability, and sustainability and (h) is the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic, environmental, and societal context. To achieve this, we utilize rubrics that are primarily filled out by the instructors and surveys that are filled out by graduating seniors, Year 1 alumni, and Year 3 alumni. Each rubric is for the assessment of one outcome item, and consists of three subcriteria. Each of these assessment efforts is independent of the other efforts, and the results from each effort are crosschecked with the results from the other efforts. Based on the outcome assessment, we show how we improve the outcome items in the capstone design course by guiding students to consider diverse sets of perspectives and consequences without teaching additional discipline or technique. Finally, we will discuss the lessons learned and challenges experienced, and comment on future endeavors