2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

With the advancement of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology
(ABET), the stakeholders of the quality assurance in engineering education have been
diversified. Especially, different stakeholders involve the quality assurance in
engineering education with different attitudes and behaviors. Engineering education
stakeholders have formed different groups representing different powers. It will help
to optimize internal quality assurance mechanisms by exploring stakeholders. Thus,
this research takes Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) as a case to study the power
of quality assurance in engineering education from the perspective of Stakeholder
Theory. The findings indicate that engineering education stakeholders have formed
three main bodies representing administrative power, academic power, and student
power, which play different roles and form different types of power participation;
administrative power participates in the preparation and organization of program
accreditation, participates in educational quality supervision, and guides teachers and
students to participate in quality assurance; academic power participates in student
learning evaluation and program continuous improvement, curriculum and teaching
reform, teacher professional development activities; student power participates in the
quality assurance both directly and indirectly. The engineering departments of the
United States attach great importance to the collective responsibility of quality
assurance in engineering education, and devote themselves to shaping the evaluation
culture based on the participation of multiple stakeholders and forming a joint force
for quality assurance in engineering education, which provides important
enlightenment for the quality assurance in engineering education in other countries.