INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL ASSESSMENT TO IMPROVE QUALITY IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION; GLOBAL EXPERIENCES AND NATIONAL EFFORTS

Quality is essential for the survival of modern educational institutions and a gateway to the globalization of higher education. In the last few decades, engineering has gone through many changes and certain criteria have been proposed for a standard engineering education. Today, leading engineering education schools have revised their educational programs to enable graduates to enter the national and international engineering job market. This situation calls for prioritizing improvement in educational program quality. One of the most common methods for identifying the quality of education is to pass the accreditation process successfully. In modern “accreditation”, instead of measuring what the university offers, the focus is on “outcomes” or what the graduates have gained. To judge the extent to which students achieve the desired outcomes, two methods of evaluation have been developed: “internal assessment” or “self-assessment” by the educational institution; and “external assessment” by independent accreditation bodies. This article first reviews the status of engineering education accreditation in the world and explains the mechanism of internal and external assessment. Then, measures that have been taken in the last decade to evaluate engineering education in Iran, according to the common criteria in the world, are explained