Accreditation Process for Engineering Programs in Saudi Arabia: Challenges and Lessons Learned

Quality of engineering education is a core principle that can never be sacrificed. To ensure quality, engineering programs/schools seek national and/or international accreditation from relevant accreditation agencies. As higher education in Saudi Arabia is evolving rapidly and to ensure high education quality standards, the Ministry of Higher Education is requesting all the institutions of higher education to be accredited by the National Commission for Academic Accreditation & Assessment (NCAAA). The accreditation process is not very much liked by most of the faculty members as they have the misconception that it is an exhausting time consuming, not to say complex and unnecessary, process. Most faculty members are not enthusiastic about going through the preparation process and its requirements from data collection, documents and forms preparation, data aggregation, data analysis, collecting evidences, and developing corrective action and future plans as needed. This paper describes requirements for programs accreditation, the preparation process, and the challenges faced during the accreditation process. Few papers were published discussing different issues related to the accreditation process in Saudi Universities. Despite the importance of the accreditation related issues discussed in those papers, the authors believe that the challenges associated with the accreditation process and their causes are not fully reported and are very important to be presented. Programs, colleges, and faculty members need to realize those challenges to try to avoid them and make the accreditation process easier and smoother. Knowledge and information gained via observation, unstructured interviews with faculty members, discussions with colleagues from different Saudi universities, and extensive involvement of the authors in the accreditation process in a private university and a public university is utilized to state challenges and barriers experienced throughout different stages of the accreditation journey. The private university was preparing for NCAAA and the public university was preparing for ABET. Although the study is based more on the national accreditation experience, it was found that similar challenges were faced and same recommendations apply for both national and international accreditation. This means that type of accreditation and differences between programs/universities was not the problem and proves that the readiness of the program and the institution is the most important catalyst of the accreditation process. The main challenges faced by different programs were added workload, understaffing, inadequate training, inability to properly prepare required forms and documents, lack of faculty commitment to the accreditation process, high faculty turn over, and lack of proper support from higher administration. The paper discusses the main causes of the problems faced during the process and presents some recommendations that might help making the accreditation process easier and smoother. The study concludes with the fact that faculty and staff commitment and belief in the importance of quality and the benefits of accreditation to the programs and institution is the key success factor in attaining accreditation. Administration cannot force faculty and staff to go quality but can convince them that quality is the perfect life style for the institution.