Course Assessment and Proposal Report (CAPR)

One of the primary keys to accreditation under EC2000 criteria is the ability to show a process for assessment of courses within a given program. Assessment must be cyclic, that is it must identify the current state of a course, identify a plan for improvement and then indicate whether or not that plan succeeded. Assessment must also be documented. Today's environment makes it possible to track a great deal of data on almost any aspect of a course, yet it takes time to convert that data into meaningful information. If too much data is collected, then time to do subsequent assessment is lost to sifting out relevant facts from collected data. With time at a premium, the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at USMA developed a document that captures key information in a format that is inherently cyclic. This document is called the Course Assessment and Proposal Report (CAPR). It was designed in August 1999 and was used for several courses during the academic year of 1999-2000. It has been expanded and is being used for all courses within the department for academic year 2000-2001. The format of the document is evolutionary in nature and will change over time to best suit the overall needs of the department. The Course Assessment and Proposal Report has five basic sections, and a series of annexes which provide detailed information. The various sections and annexes are designed such that they can be easily extracted from the CAPR and used to support a variety of other requirements.