Undergraduate BAEM Program Evaluation and Improvement
 

As part of the continual assessment and improvement process implemented by ABET, we will continue to report on the changes to the undergraduate program. These changes are based on inputs from students, employers, alumni, and faculty members. As you may recall, the program underwent several changes on the switch from quarters to semesters in Fall 1999. These changes included going from Fortran to C/C++ as a programming language, introducing a new Instrumentation Laboratory (which uses C/C++ programming), requiring a full year of capstone design, and adding a required Space Flight Dynamics course. We have also addressed new concerns by adding Matlab to the Mechanics of Flight course. Also this past year, we added a project to the design course supervised by Professor Balas, re-organized our upper division advising system, and added more comprehensive treatment of ethics to our senior design and lab courses.

We have been considering other possible program improvements. For example, we have been discussing better ways to integrate some of the computer programs used in the senior design sequence into other courses. One suggestion to accomplish this is to introduce a new course in which these programs are introduced, but it is difficult to see where to fit this in an already crowded schedule. We are also adding more topics in engineering ethics into the curriculum, and especially in the design sequence. Finally, we are working to improve the quality of advising in AEM. We have trained a group of faculty as core advisors, and they will be responsible for all Upper Division advising. The implementation of our new web-based course database system has proven to be a huge help in tracking student progress, prerequisite chains and so on.

We are very excited by the possibilities that our new faculty member, Demoz Gebre-Egziabher, will bring to the undergraduate program. Professor Gebre-Egziabher specializes in navigation, guidance and control, and will add new courses and directions to both the undergraduate and graduate curriculum.

Perry Leo
Director, Undergraduate Studies and
Associate Head

 Next- Educational Objectives – How Are We Doing?

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