Accreditation

During my early years in the computing field I was very interested in being “professional”. This included becoming a member of both of the preeminent computer science professional societies – ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), and IEEE-CS (Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Computer Science). I had joined ACM as an undergraduate and IEEE-CS shortly after entering the work force.

Because of my ACM and IEEE-CS memberships, I became aware of an emerging effort to accredit university computer science programs.  Program-level accreditation is extremely common in academia and as the two leading professional societies (and with many of their members being in academia as well), ACM and IEEE-CS were the obvious places for such accreditation efforts to begin.  They jointly formed a new organization called the Computing Sciences Accreditation Board (CSAB) with one initial accrediting commission under it – the Computer Science Accreditation Commission (CSAC).  This was modeled after ABET (the Accrediting Board for Engineering and Technology) that existed in the engineering field which had separate commissions for the different branches of engineering (several years after my association with them CSAB merged with ABET).  They issued a call for participation.  While there were many in academia to choose from, they were especially interested in having participation from those in industry and government – to give the organization some legitimacy – and so I was accepted as an evaluator for the initial round of certification visits in 1985.  There were a few days of training in Las Vegas, as well as the couple of days involved in the accreditation visit, but my manager approved my participation.

That first year I was assigned to a team that would be visiting Mississippi State University.  The team chair (there were three on each team) was a professor from Houston who was also one of the board members of CSAB.  I must have done well, as he recommended me as a team chair for the next year’s cycle. The team chair’s responsibility was to make all the university contacts and schedule the visit, to lead the team during the three-day visit, to interview all the appropriate university leadership (president, provost, deans, etc.), to compile the visit report with input from the other team members, to correspond with the university to get their response to the report and verify any corrective actions taken, and finally to represent the team at the annual CSAC meeting in the spring.  CSAC was composed of all the team chairs from that year and their vote on the presentations from each team chair determined whether the university program would be accredited.

The universities that wanted to be considered for accreditation were essentially on at least a two-year cycle. They would spend at least a year in self-study, producing a sizable document that they would submit to their assigned team chair. Some of the standards that the institution must meet are not negotiable – such as the program being accredited must have actually had graduates that had taken the curriculum that they offered, i.e. we were accrediting real programs, not pieces of paper. But many of the standards are measures of quality that can only be assessed by the team visiting the institution. They then hosted the team for a visit in the fall. Between the end of the visit and the CSAC meeting in the spring they would have to present evidence of what changes they made based on the visiting team’s recommendations, and the vote of CSAC would take place in the spring.

The team members would each receive a copy of the self-study (from the team chair) and read it before the visit. The team would individually fly in and they would all meet the night before the visit to plan who was going to do what the following day. The next morning the team would initially meet with the department chair to go over their plans. We would also view all the other materials that the institution had prepared for us. This would include copies of all syllabi for required courses, copies of the textbooks used, copies of graded exams, and transcripts for a few students who had graduated from the program (with identifying information obscured as appropriate). Each member of the team would have scheduled some time during the day to review this material.

The team would then split up so they could cover as much ground as possible that day. We would try to interview as many faculty members as we could in the CS department, interview students (often by going into a lab and asking several students there if they would like to talk to us – so the institution couldn’t “cherry pick” the students we talked to), and see the facilities and labs that the institution had. We would also interview representatives of supporting departments (essentially any department where CS students had required courses – like math, physics, and English). We would also visit the library to review their CS reference book collections and subscriptions to significant periodicals in the field. In addition to covering some of these areas, the team chair would visit with the dean of the college that the CS department was in, the vice-president of institutional research (to get an idea of what the faculty were doing for research), and the university president. That night the team would meet after dinner to review the events of the day, decide what follow-up visits were needed the next day, and the team chair would charge each team member to write the various sections of the report. It was a very full day.

The next day the team would do any follow-up visits and over lunch and into the early afternoon they would draft their preliminary findings, including commendations and recommendations. Before leaving that afternoon, there would be an exit report given by the team chair to the president and dean (and whomever else those individuals wished to hear the results such as the department chair). The primary information delivered would be a verbal presentation of the commendations and recommendations (usually with those listening fiercely taking notes). No report would be made of what the recommendation of the team chair to CSAC would be made, since there were several months for the institution to rectify any deficiencies.

Over the following months the team chair would get the written reports from the team members (based on the assignment that he/she had made), correspond with the institution on what corrective actions they had made (with verification), and prepare a short presentation to be given to the full commission when they met in the spring. The chair could recommend to the commission to not accredit, to give full accreditation, or to give accreditation for a shorter amount of time during which the institution would have to correct some specified issues.

Because accreditation is valued so highly, the ability of the accreditation team to influence changes in the institution was always impressive to me. I personally witnessed one CS department, as part of their corrective action plan, get allocation from the institution for another full professorship. At another, we noted that the physics department, which was only a service department since the institution did not offer a degree program in physics, was still using WWII surplus oscilloscopes. Based on our report that they needed to expose the CS students to more modern equipment, the physics department was able to get a $50K allocation from the institution for equipment – something that the department had unsuccessfully been trying to get for several years. I also witnessed another team that had visited one of the military service academies. Getting additional funds required not only approval of the institution, but approval from much higher up the chain at the senior levels in the Pentagon. But because the team identified a particular need, the team chair was impressed that they got approval from a normally slow-moving government agency in a matter of weeks! The institutions generally welcomed our recommendations since they saw that we were trying to help them improve.

Over the next several years I had to pleasure of chairing a team each year to different universities – University of Southern Mississippi, University of South Alabama, Benedictine College (near Chicago), Norfolk State University, NE Louisiana University and Pace University (outside of NYC).  As one of the very few industry representatives in this very academic endeavor (I was one of only a couple of non-academics who was a team chair), I was often met by some skepticism by university administration (i.e. presidents).  They asked, “How can someone from outside of academia know what we do and critique us?”  But one president remarked to me, “You missed your calling” once I had made my report visit to he and his staff at the end of our visit.  Appointment to CSAC was limited to two three-year terms, so after six years of serving in this capacity, my final CSAC meeting was in 1992.

I believe that accreditation is a process that, while arduous, can be of great benefit to the institution. And I also believe that it is a combination both of a rigorous set of standards and an accreditation team that applies appropriate interpretation of those standards to the institution that makes it successful. You need both.