ABEEK(Accreditation Board for Engineering Education of Korea) is a program that evaluates whether a particular engineering program meets the global engineering education standards. If the program of a department satisfies the requirement specified by ABEEK, the certificate will be awarded. ABEEK was first established in 1999 and started the accreditation procedure from 2000. Until now, many engineering departments received ABEEK evaluation. In particular, ABEEK evaluates education objectives, faculty number and quality, and contents of classes in the department, etc. In this paper, the author introduces the status of engineering education accreditation in Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea. Some opinions, based on these experiences, are also proposed for the direction of ABEEK.
Compared with other academic programs, engineering accreditation program applies more strict requirement criteria such as exact completion of the curricula and earning of all required credits, which causes many enrolled students to abandon the accreditation program. To solve these problems, Hanyang University implemented the curricular reformation including the exemption from prerequisite courses and the reduction of credits in the advanced study for major. As a result, more students could participate in the accreditation programs.
In the engineering accreditation briefing session or in the academic consultation for students, the most embarrassing and difficult question to answer is "What are the benefits that graduates of engineering accreditation program can get?" In case of Hanyang University, there is no meaningful difference between graduates of engineering accreditation programs and graduates of non-accreditation programs in terms of the employment rate and the entry into graduate schools. One of the reasons is that there are still not enough number of engineering accreditation graduates and thus the firms recruiting these graduates still are not in the position to evaluate the effect of engineering accreditation in the industry’s viewpoint.
In order that engineering accreditation may establish itself firmly in place the industry propose their own evaluation criteria that involve the industry’s standpoint in view of the accreditation graduates’ abilities and knowledges in the engineering practices. ABEEK, then based on this proposal, can work on promotion toward the firms for practical benefits to the accreditation graduates. The university also should expand its support for accreditation programs. Even though university’s support for accreditation program has become more diversified and well-organized, one of the major constraints of engineering accreditation is that professors’ burden for accreditation preparation are too heavy. In order to lighten this burden from professors the accreditation procedure including university’s self-evaluation report for accreditation survey must be more simplified.
Recently there are occurring several incidents that some universities are withdrawing from engineering accreditation system. Every system, if terminated during its implementation, may cause damages, and if engineering accreditation program is unexpectedly withdrawn by a university, it will bring confusion and damage to students. Therefore ABEEK, together with the participating universities, must prepare improved accreditation system with new paradigm.