ABET Electrical Engineering

The map above is a complete ABET-aligned curriculum map for a BS in Electrical Engineering. All 35 courses in the program are connected to 307 learning outcomes, and every outcome is aligned to one or more of the 15 ABET standards the program is evaluated against — the seven Criterion 3 student outcomes (SO1–SO7) plus eight EE-specific program criteria (circuit analysis, electronics, signal processing, electromagnetics, digital systems, power, control, and communications).

Click any ABET student outcome to see exactly which courses contribute to it. Click any course to see the learning outcomes it delivers and the ABET standards those outcomes satisfy. Pan across the program to see prerequisite chains. The whole self-study story — what’s taught, where, and which standards it satisfies — lives in a single queryable structure instead of a stack of spreadsheets.

This is what an accreditation evidence package looks like when it’s not a folder of documents.

Most engineering programs do the work of meeting ABET. The problem isn’t the curriculum — it’s the evidence. When an ABET site visit is six months out, the work begins:

• Comb through 35 syllabi looking for learning outcome statements.
• Build a course-by-outcome coverage matrix from scratch — sometimes for the third time in three cycles.
• Email faculty asking which outcomes their course “really” addresses.
• Reconcile mismatches between what the syllabus says and what the instructor remembers.
• Assemble student work samples per outcome, per assessment cycle.
• Hope that the assessment data tells a coherent story.

None of this is intellectually hard. It’s just laborious, redundant, and lossy — because the underlying alignment data was never structured in the first place.

A program coordinator at a mid-sized engineering school spends an estimated 200–400 hours assembling a single self-study report. Most of that work is reconstructing relationships that were always there but never written down as data.

The map above takes that latent structure and makes it explicit — once, then reusable across every accreditation cycle.

For decades, the standard way to document ABET alignment has been a coverage matrix: courses down the left, student outcomes across the top, an I / R / A (introduced / reinforced / assessed) in each cell. It’s simple, portable, and Excel-friendly.

It also hides almost everything ABET actually wants to see.

What the matrix can’t represent:

• Granularity below the course level. A course doesn’t align to an outcome. Specific learning outcomes within a course align to ABET standards. The matrix erases that detail.
• Prerequisite structure. Senior Design I depends on Circuit Analysis II depends on Electronics I. That dependency chain matters when an evaluator asks how outcomes build cumulatively.
• Both kinds of standards at once. ABET EAC accreditation requires meeting both Criterion 3 (general) and EE-specific Criterion 5 program criteria. That’s 15 columns in a matrix, growing.
• Continuous improvement. When a course changes, every downstream impact has to be re-traced manually. In a network map, the relationships are already there — you edit one node and the implications are visible.

Courses are organized into seven subject areas — Mathematics & Sciences, Circuits & Electronics, Signals/Systems/Control, Electromagnetics & RF, Power & Energy Systems, Computing & Embedded Systems, and Capstone & Professional Practice. Each course has its own learning outcomes, and each outcome carries explicit satisfies edges to one or more ABET standards.

Prerequisite chains run across the program: 272 explicit requires relationships document how higher-level courses build on foundations. That structure is invisible in a coverage matrix and laborious to reconstruct in a self-study narrative.

Once built, this map is the source of truth. The next ABET cycle isn’t a 200-hour rebuild — it’s an update.

The map above was built using Outcomap. The same approach works for any ABET program, any accreditation framework, and any curriculum where alignment to standards matters.

What you can map:

• ABET EAC — engineering programs (electrical, mechanical, civil, chemical, computer, biomedical, aerospace, industrial). Same Criterion 3 + program-specific criteria as the example above.
• ABET CAC — computing programs (computer science, information systems, cybersecurity, data science). Different student outcomes, same methodology.
• ABET ETAC and ANSAC — engineering technology and applied/natural sciences. Same mapping approach.
• Other accreditors — HLC, SACSCOC, WASC, MSCHE, NEASC, AACSB, CAEP, ACEN, CCNE, NZQA, QAA. Pick your framework, define the standards as entities, build the map. Start from one of the accreditation templates and customize.

How Outcomap works:

1. Upload your existing materials. Syllabi, program self-study reports, ABET criteria documents. AI extracts courses, outcomes, and standards as a draft map.
2. Refine in the visual editor. Draw alignment edges, add prerequisite chains, fix any AI guesses. Faculty review their own courses in a UI they don’t need training to use.
3. Publish for the site visit. One-click publish gives evaluators a live read-only URL — pan, zoom, click. Embed it in your self-study report. Export coverage tables.

Accreditation cycles are work that should compound. Each one shouldn’t start from scratch. The map is the asset that carries forward.