Reading Material and Forms

1. Accreditation background document (PDF)
2. Proposed remapping of BME courses to Student Outcomes (PDF)
3. FCAR (Faculty Course Assessment Report) form (DOCX)
4. FCAR example (PDF)
5. Course Outline form (DOCX)
6. Course Outline example (PDF)

How to Fill out an FCAR Form

1. The best time to fill out an FCAR is right after the quarter ends. In addition to your EEE gradebook, you may also want to take a look at your course survey data available through EEE. Examples of FCAR forms from prior academic years may be found in the Table below.
2. Download the customized FCAR form (see below). You may need to edit the Academic Year, Term, Course Code and Title, as well as the Instructor's name (if they are not correct).
3. Please do not change the Performance Indicators (PIs)! If you think that your PIs should change, please consult with the BME curriculum committee. Setting the PI standard is up to the instructor (typically 67% of the maximum score is chosen). For most of our courses, the percentage of students meeting the PI standard falls between 70% and 80%. If you end up with 100%, your PI standard may have been too low and you should consider increasing it.
4. Fill out the assessment table, which is the centerpiece of FCAR. New effective the 2011-2012 school year is that the assessment must be done separately for BME and BMEP majors. Unfortunately, our main source of data (EEE gradebook) does not contain information on the students' major. This information is available from the roster data, so effectively, one will need to merge the two databases (gradebook and webroster)--which are both available through EEE. If you have Excel, here is a not so short tutorial on how to export these files from EEE and merge them together. I also wrote a MATLAB script to analyze these files and organize data into an FCAR-friendly format. If you decide to follow this route, I'd be more than happy to provide help, should you need it.
5. Once you are done with the assessment table, you may move on to Course Learning Outcomes (CLOs). This may be a good opportunity to revise your Course Outline form, where CLOs are typically defined. The editable form and example can be found above (items #3 and #4). To facilitate editing, I left several comments in the Course Outline form. The updated Course Outlines should be e-mailed to the CASA office. Ideally, your CLOs should be mapped into PIs, so filling out this table should be very easy. CLOs are not ABET requirements, but we will need them for other types of accreditations in the future.
6. Finally, fill in the boxes at the bottom of FCAR. The best way to do this is to take a look at your assessment numbers and your course survey feedback. If a specific comment is persistently brought up by multiple students it is probably worth addressing. If you make recommendations, make sure you follow up on those next time you teach the course.

FCAR Completeness Tables