Gathering the voice of the students for accreditation purposes through their definition of “engineer”

This paper proposes a novel indirect assessment method to capture the voice of the students for program accreditation purposes. It consists of asking students, individually and then in teams, to draw up a list of keywords they associate with being an engineer and to write a formal definition of engineer. The raw data (list of keywords and definitions) is closed coded for the twelve graduate attributes (GAs) defined by Engineers Canada. First-year, mid-program and last-year students participated in the study in order to verify change of perception as students advance through the program. Results are compared for individual and teams, as well as for the different student populations. Sufficient insight into the program’s contribution to the development of graduate attributes in its student population (or apparent lack thereof), information that can be used for continual program improvement, was gained to warrant internal validity of the method.