Aiding and ABETing: The bankruptcy of outcomes-based education as a change strategy

Abstract

ABET's Engineering Criteria (EC) 2000 were widely heralded among engineering education reformers as a harbinger of change. And while historians in the Liberal Education Division reminded us that calls for better communication and consideration of social context were not new in engineering education, many dared to hope that things would be different this time. New engineering programs founded in this era promised a clean slate from which to create models of more balanced curricula. ABET's bean counting formulas had so obviously constrained creativity and stifled reform efforts; surely this shift would provide both flexibility and external incentive to engineering programs to make much needed changes. A decade later, with most programs having gone through two accreditation cycles under EC 2000, we have seen at best incremental change in the liberal education of students and diversification of the profession. In retrospect, adopting outcomes-based education (OBE) might have raised more red flags, as its problems have been well known to education scholars for some time. Drawing on social theories of education that take a critical view of OBE, this paper shows how ABET's implementation across engineering education reproduces and reinforces a certain social order in the profession and in society, one that continues to resist real change in educational structures, curriculum, and pedagogy. Within the power structures that exist in engineering education institutions, ABET's Student Outcomes (Criterion 3; commonly known as "a-k") sometimes can be used to justify broadening the curriculum when such efforts come under attack by self-appointed technical rigor police. However, just as often, it constrains what is possible in engineering classrooms through its drive for (certain kinds of) evidence of achievement of specified outcomes, regardless of process. ABET supports students' focus on credentialing to the exclusion of intellectual curiosity, undermining its stated outcome of lifelong learning. That diversity goes unmentioned in the defined Student Outcomes reinforces the invisibility of underrepresented groups and tacitly teaches students to devalue efforts to resist exclusionary or unjust practices in the profession. The paper will close with some discussion of alternatives to outcomes-based education that might better support change in engineering education. © 2012 American Society for Engineering Education.