FE as an Outcomes Assessment Tool

As the only nationally normed exam that addresses specific engineering topics, the FE exam is an extremely attractive tool for outcomes assessment.

Effective assessment of academic programs requires a set of tools and processes to evaluate various aspects of education. If the tools are to have any value as benchmarks or have credibility on some objective basis, they should make it possible to compare the results over time. This is essential to the continuous improvement process, since determining the effect of curriculum or instructional changes on outcomes is critical. Assessment tools with this comparative value are particularly difficult to obtain. Methods such as evaluation of portfolios and student exit surveys lack uniformity.