The era of continuous improvement is upon us and many academic institutions of higher learning, and their academic programs, have come to realize some of the challenges involved in satisfying the mandates imposed by different accrediting agencies. For those institutions in the southern United States, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) is the main accrediting agency. For Engineering and Engineering Technology programs within such institutions, ABET inc., is the main accrediting agency for their programs. While it is very rare that an institution will have both accreditation agencies visiting in the same year, it does occasionally occur. The Electrical and Computer Engineering Technology (ECET) department at Southern Polytechnic State University has recently had to deal with this occurrence. Since a total of six Engineering Technology programs on campus were up for accreditation, the institution felt that it was necessary, and important, to co-ordinate the preparations for the visit, and at the same time to prepare for the SACS visit which followed. In preparing for these visits, several challenges were encountered that contributed to making the task more arduous than usual. Apart from the fact that not all of the programs were within the same college, were under the administration of different Deans, and were in various different stages of preparedness, the language of accreditation that is used by ABET inc., was sometimes found to be in conflict with that used by SACS. This paper discusses some of the issues encountered in preparing for the two visits and the efforts made to reconcile the ABET and SACS accreditation requirements.
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