Assessment of Educational Objectives in Chemical and Petroleum Engineering Programs

Within the Chemical and Petroleum Engineering (CPE) programs, establishing and reviewing educational objectives is part of the assessment and continuous improvement cycle for the programs. This paper describes a process for the establishment and assessment of the educational objectives set by the CPE Department at the United Arab Emirates University. This process is initiated by defining the CPE programs outcomes to match the ABET (A-K) EC2000 criteria and from these outcomes the program educational objectives are derived. Next, the assessment tools are defined and these include Alumni and Employer surveys and special formats are prepared to achieve this purpose. The Alumni Survey is designed to provide the information needed by both programs to continuously measure the degree to which the concluded educational objectives are attained. The Employer Survey is designed to assess how well the graduates of the two programs meet the educational objectives from their employers' perspectives. The results of the two surveys are averaged using a weighting factor designed to provide some judgment on the importance, quality, and number of feedbacks of each tool. It may generally be concluded that the overall educational objectives of both programs have been largely met with average score for each objective between 4 and 4.4 out of 5.0 and that incremental enhancements could help achieve further improvements.