With the adoption of an outcomes-based approach to engineering education, it has become necessary to develop methods for assessing students' abilities to meet program outcomes. In the mid 1990's, a major reform was undertaken in the mechanical engineering curriculum at Union College. This was preceded by the development of a mission statement, program objectives, and specification of program-specific student outcomes. An initial assessment program to measure and evaluate the attainment of the outcomes was developed and implemented. Since then we have developed several additional assessment strategies. Our objective is to find the best way to maximize the useful information on student outcomes so that the faculty can make informed decisions about the program. As a small school we felt that it was important to include direct faculty input on students' abilities. This paper will describe a technique in which faculty "graded" each individual graduating student on how well they met each program outcome. We will describe the faculty assessment process and present several ways of examining the results. We also compared the results to student self assessments. One interesting and challenging aspect of using multiple assessment strategies occurs when the results attained through each method yield conflicting data. We will describe the faculty assessment technique and discuss how we resolved conflicting information.
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