Formulating Course Outcomes and Mapping with Program Outcomes

Abstract

National Board of Accreditation (NBA), India, a permanent signatory member of the Washington accord is insisting on Outcome Based Accreditation to be exhibited by the graduates, in terms of their knowledge, skills and attitude immediately after successful completion of their program. Hence, Teaching and Learning process in an academic curriculum necessitates a consistent methodology for establishing and benchmarking the accomplishment of graduate outcomes against the program outcomes, coherent with the objectives of the program. In this proposed approach, the Course Outcomes (COs) of each course in the curriculum are to be suitably mapped with Program Outcomes (POs) at appropriate levels. There is lack of understanding in the teaching community for mapping the COs with POs at suitable correlation levels, even though there are several methodologies available in literature. An attempt has been made in this article, to propose suitable guidelines for course instructors and facilitate them to formulate COs and map the same with POs at different correlation levels for undergraduate engineering courses, based on the assessment used to examine the attainment of COs.