Program Assessment and Alignment

The Systems Engineering program at the United States Military Academy at West Point is quite a young program especially when compared to the other programs at this 206 year-old engineering university.As a young program we continue to evolve into the program necessary for our constituents -the Nation, the Army, the Academy and the West Point Community, the Faculty and the Staff and, finally, the Cadets themselves.To meet the needs of these constituents, we recently conducted a comprehensive selfevaluation.The results were a better alignment of our program objectives, our program outcomes, our courses and our lessons.To ensure our lessons and our courses sufficiently guide our cadets to achieve our program outcomes, we have developed and implemented a detailed and comprehensive outcome assessment methodology.Using a rubric-based assessment system, we will capture the performance of all our graduates to assess their learning and guide our future program development.Though this assessment methodology has only recently been implemented, it is already proven to be helpful in garnering insights into our program construction.It also has some drawbacks which we will work through and discuss in this paper.