Designing an ABET Accreditatable Computer Science Bachelor's Program within the Constraints of
Carol A. Wellington · 2004
The Computer Science Department of Shippensburg University has recently embarked on the pursuit of ABET Accreditation. While our existing curriculum was supported by the ACM Curriculum Guidelines, our assessment tools were insufficient for accreditation. In addition, since Shippensburg is a small teaching school, accreditation poses some significant logistical issues in the areas of teaching load and faculty development. As a result, we completely re-designed the structure of our program to meet these challenges. Our goal was a program where all of our students learn traditional computer science topics and basic software engineering principles and where they are allowed the opportunity to specialize in areas like software engineering, computer graphics, and real-time systems. Our required teaching load is 24 credits per year which makes professional development difficult. We significantly modified the structure of the program to allow each of our faculty members to teach no more than three courses and two preparations in a semester. This paper outlines the challenges, the process we used to address those challenges, and the resulting curriculum and assessment plan.