Implementation of outcome based education in Pakistan: A step towards Washington Accord

Abstract

Established in 1989, the Washington Accord is an international accreditation covenant for the undergraduate engineering programs. It recognizes that there is significant equivalency of the engineering programs accredited by those signatories and that graduates of accredited programs in any of the signatory countries are acknowledged by the other signatory countries as having met the academic requirements for entry in to the practice of engineering. Pakistan Engineering council (PEC) is a provisional signatory to the Washington Accord. To be able to get the regular membership status, PEC must implement outcome based education (OBE) as compared to the current traditional teaching approach in the engineering degree awarding institutes (ADI) in Pakistan. In this paper we describe our experience of using the faculty course assessment report (FCAR) for the assessment and evaluation of student performance in the BS electrical engineering degree program at Iqra National University Peshawar, Pakistan while preparing for initial step towards fulfilling the PEC requirements hence enabling it to be the regular member of Washington Accord. We have described, how FCAR is used as an effective tool for monitoring students performance in Signal and Systems course.