I can’t say how companies would react to an emerging new accreditation credential, but I remember my experience at one particular company. I was asked to suggest pipelines for minority candidates, which the company was constantly recruiting, due to high turnover of all engineers. The company began to hire engineering technology graduates to fill engineer positions. Engineering technology was a good match for the type of work done by our engineers. I have always wondered whether the company was hiring smart, or whether HR did not know the difference between engineering and engineering technology. I will never know, but I have always suspected the latter.

I love your ideas about using games and avatars to give students a safe way to engage, reflect, and revisit their own views. This gives me ideas about treating topics like ethics in engineering courses. What if there were some recurring characters that the class is introduced to early, through a biographical sketch and an editorial piece authored by the character? The characters can show up from time to time during the course, weighing in on various topics, getting caught in dilemmas, perhaps asking the class for advice. These actors can provide a framework for the class to contemplate complex issues and conflict of interest, or even consequences of the technology itself. Thank you for a very richly detailed post!

In light of the present development, the unilateral move by ABET, without advice or consent of its members, to dilute engineering education criteria, I will not look to ABET to provide structure for any kind of educational scheme.

Thank you for sharing your experience! I had students assess team project presentations, including their own team’s, using a simple rubric, then I analyzed the results. Most students would score their own team slightly higher than the average of the assessments they gave. A few students scored their own team’s presentation lower, and these students tended to provide detailed feedback to all teams. I compile the student feedback comments (anonymously) into the feedback that I attach to the team’s presentation grade. I used the student assessments averaged with my own scoring (by the same rubric) to determine the project presentation grade. For the students who provided non-trivial feedback, I added points to their score. I did not tell the students that I was going to do this, but I consider it fair because the grading sheet they filled out had a section for comments. Also, providing a useful and thoughtful assessment to others is part of good teamwork and good citizenship.

I gave extra points to students who asked questions of the other teams at the end of the presentation, without telling students that I would do so. If a team displayed poor citizenship by not paying attention to other presentations (by working on their own project), I would penalize their score, still using the rubric. Teams were disappointed to find that the penalty was so high (say 10℅), as if a 5% penalty makes it acceptable to them to be rude to other teams!

I have also found that students appreciate being able to assess their individual team members, and those whose self assessments matched closely to assessments of them by others tended to give thorough and thoughtful feedback. What all of this means to me is that there are some useful and fair ways for students to assess themselves and one another. Moreover, students can be assessed by their assessment. I need to explore these concepts and practices further and integrate them more deeply into the instruction, without compromising the authenticity by telling students that they will get a higher grade by writing something in that space.