Program Criteria Updates

There’s a lot of exciting news to share in CSAB’s lead discipline areas:

First, A Note About Program Criteria: Program-specific criteria are applied based on the name and content of the program seeking evaluation. Accredited programs are required to meet both the applicable program criteria and the general criteria of the relevant ABET accreditation commission(s).

Program criteria typically begin their development within or among ABET member societies, which then submit them for approval to the relevant ABET commission. Following commission approval, program criteria are considered for first reading, second reading, and final approval by the ABET Area Delegations.

CSAB is the lead ABET member society for programs in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, Data Science, Information Systems, Information Technology, and Software Engineering. All general and program criteria can be found on ABET’s website at https://www.abet.org/accreditation/accreditation-criteria/.

Data Science: Last summer, the Computing Accreditation Commission (CAC) and Computing Area Delegation (CAD) approved criteria for accrediting undergraduate Data Science programs under CAC. These were developed by a subcommittee of the CSAB-CAC Joint Criteria Committee, and were posted publicly for a review and comment period last fall.

Since that time, members of this subcommittee, along with others from CSAB, its new member the American Statistical Association, and the Applied and Natural Sciences Accreditation Commission (ANSAC) of ABET, have been working on developing similar criteria for accreditation of Data Science programs under ANSAC.

Based on input received during the public review period for the CAC version and a desire to align (as appropriate) the two sets of criteria, the CAC criteria were modified and resubmitted to the commission in July. At the same time, CSAB submitted to ANSAC the newly developed criteria for accrediting Data Science programs within that commission. Both sets of criteria were approved by their respective commissions last month.

Public review and comment periods for these criteria will not begin until they are approved by the relevant ABET Area Delegations at the end of October. Until that time, the proposals submitted by CSAB to ANSAC and CAC can be viewed here.

Associate’s Cybersecurity: Based on feedback from an initial round of pilot visits, these criteria were slightly modified, resubmitted to, and approved by the CAC last month. Until these are approved for second reading by the CAD at the end of October, they can be viewed here.

Information Technology: The optional period for programs seeking accreditation under the previous version of the CAC Information Technology criteria has now concluded. The new criteria are in effect for all programs submitting requests for evaluation in 2022 and beyond. These are available for reference on ABET’s website: https://www.abet.org/accreditation/accreditation-criteria/criteria-for-accrediting-computing-programs-2021-2022/#2

Computer Science: A joint ACM, IEEE-CS, and AIAA task force co-chaired by CSAB’s and CAC’s Rajendra Raj is working on updating undergraduate Computer Science curricula. CAC computer science program criteria will likely be updated within the next two years based on the conclusions of the task force.

If you are interested in seeking ABET accreditation for your degree program, visit https://www.abet.org/accreditation/what-is-accreditation/eligibility-requirements/ for eligibility requirements and links to relevant documents, contacts, and additional information.