Assessment of Higher Education Quality by Using Cohort of First-year in University

The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) has issued a number of general guidelines for assessing continuous improvement (Criterion 4) but does not endorse any particular method or process for doing so. As a result, many universities seeking accreditation from the organization have developed their own methods to fulfill that particular criterion. The objective of this paper is twofold: 1) to present and review critically a number of methods used by ABET-accredited engineering programs for assessing continuous quality improvement, and 2) to present and argue in favor of a new and more efficient method based on cohort analysis.