Optimizing Assessment Tasks for Institutional and Program-Level Accreditations: A Case Study of Accreditation Requirements of MSCHE and ABET

Academic institutions in the United States often engage in challenging tasks of accreditation activities at both the institutional and program levels. Although the institutional and program level accreditations are not quite similar in scope, they do have a number of common accreditation requirements. The assessment tasks for those common accreditation requirements can be arranged to complement each other, thereby minimizing nearly redundant tasks and optimizing the overall process for an institution. This work aims to demonstrate an instance of such optimization by exploiting the commonalities in the accreditation standards and consolidating the pertinent assessment tasks between the Middle States Commission of Higher Education (MSCHE), a key institutional accreditor, and Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET), the leading engineering program accreditor. This paves the way for academic institutions nationwide to optimize their activities involving several other accreditation bodies at both the institutional and program levels.