Achievements, issues and recommendations of quality assurance in engineering education within colleges and universities in china under the background of program accreditation

Abstract

China's officially joining the Washington Accord as an associate member marks a significant progress of engineering education internationalization. How to effectively take advantage of program accreditation organization to promote the continuous quality improvement of engineering education becomes an important issue confronted by engineering education in China. This research makes in-depth surveys and analyses against the main achievements and basic issues of quality assurance in engineering education under the background of program accreditation, based on in-depth interviews with different stakeholders, program self-assessment reports and expert accreditation reports submitted by colleges and universities between 2006 and 2016. The survey shows that the program accreditation of engineering education in China follows the pilot-promotion model; over the past three decades, great progress has been made in the program accreditation of engineering education in China; colleges and universities have actively applied for the program accreditation by the Chinese Engineering Education Accreditation Association(CEEAA),and has a good degree of participation at the provincial, university and program levels; some programs in a few universities in China have applies and passed the program accreditation by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) with broader practical significance. At present, there are still challenges in how to carry out education quality management, how to ensure the participation of stakeholders, how to carry out education quality evaluation, how to ensure continuous quality improvement, and how to achieve integration with internationalization. In the future, the practice paths for the optimization of quality assurance in engineering education in China include: deepening the student-centered and outcome-oriented educational philosophy; emphasizing the spontaneity of institutions to shape endogenous evaluation culture; taking the opportunity of program accreditation reform to improve the guarantee mechanism of educational quality; and eliminating the deep differences in internationalization to rebuild the path of substantial equivalent accreditation.