2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In a globalized world, where mobility of professionals is ever more frequent and accessible, higher education institutions face the challenge of educating students with programs that are accredited internationally. Accreditation processes are not only based in academic excellence, but in the development of competencies and skills that allow graduates perform in a very competitive environment.
Many Higher Education Institutions consider very important to be accredited with international standards. In this context, the Washington Agreement (WA) plays an important role by certifying that universities and their graduates may be recognized by other nations. By having an accreditation universities can make sure that their graduates have the necessary competences defined for each program and in agreement with the WA.
For our university, xxxx, the accreditation of its Engineering programs is done through the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET). In Mexico there is a similar institution that works closely with ABET, that is the Accreditation Board for Engineering Education, a civil association (CACEI). In order to get to the ABET accreditation programs must first fulfill the national requirements of CACEI. In both accreditation boards there are certain fundamental criteria that allow institutions to comply with the Washington Agreement standards. These criteria include aspects such as the credentials of the academic personnel, the syllabus for each program, infrastructure, services as well as the processes for admission of new students. Furthermore, special attention is given to the integral accompaniment of students throughout their studies and the follow-up to the graduates, so that there is a continuous improvement of the competencies (outcomes) and the program educational objectives for each accreditation board. One of the main recurring challenges in an accreditation process is the documentation and evidence gathering for all the criteria. Sometimes, institutions face difficulties during this process because they lack well established processes for the documentation of all evidences throughout the period to be evaluated during an accreditation visit.
This document presents a continuous improvement model designed to facilitate the academic follow-up of any academic program, allowing a detailed observation of each key performance indicator (KPI), its analysis and the implementation of measures for the overall improvement of the academic program. This model offers a clear structure for such documentation, and also, the development of some tools for the better visualization and analysis of the academic KPIs. This model has been successfully applied to three Engineering programs in our institution: Industrial and Systems Engineering, Computational Technologies Engineering and Mechatronics. The accreditation boards for the three programs were the Mexican CACEI and ABET, all during 2024 with very positive results in each accreditation, reducing significantly the observations from the evaluation committee when compared to previous accreditations. We present the results of our model in each of the accreditation processes so that other institutions in other countries might use it as a starting point for their own programs that subjected to accreditation.