The ABET Self-Study Report, section by section (CAC)

Start with ABET's official questionnaire

ABET publishes a Self-Study Questionnaire for each commission, and it is the real template. For computing programs, you want the CAC questionnaire. It is free, and it is the authoritative outline you build your report on. You can download it from ABET's self-study templates page. Everything below follows that structure; the goal here is to explain what each part means, not to replace ABET's document.

The structure of a CAC self-study report

• Background Information. Contact, program history, options and tracks, delivery modes, locations, where your objectives and outcomes are published, and any deficiencies from your last review and what you did about them.
• Criterion 1, Students. Admissions, how you evaluate and monitor student progress, transfer credit, advising, credit for work in lieu of courses, and graduation requirements, with transcripts as evidence.
• Criterion 2, Program Educational Objectives. Your mission, your published objectives, how they align with the institution's mission and your constituencies' needs, and the review process that keeps them current.
• Criterion 3, Student Outcomes. The five CAC computing outcomes plus any you add, and where they are publicly stated.
• Criterion 4, Continuous Improvement. The hard one. How you assess each student outcome, how often, your expected attainment levels, your results, and, most importantly, how those results actually fed back into program changes. This is where computing programs most often pick up shortcomings, not because the work is not happening, but because the loop is hard to show on paper across a six-year cycle.
• Criterion 5, Curriculum. Your plan of study in Table 5-1, how the curriculum supports your outcomes, and for the current cycle, the comprehensive project or experience and the professional dispositions CAC now asks computing programs to demonstrate.
• Criterion 6, Faculty. Qualifications, competence and currency, workload, size, and professional development, backed by the faculty tables and vitae.
• Criterion 7, Facilities. Offices, classrooms, labs, computing resources, guidance, maintenance, and library services.
• Criterion 8, Institutional Support. Leadership, budget, staffing, hiring and retention, faculty development, and the respectful-environment element CAC includes here.
• Program Criteria and Appendices. The discipline-specific criteria for your program title, plus course syllabi, faculty vitae, equipment, and the institutional summary.

The template was never the hard part

The questionnaire tells you what to write. It does not solve the actual problem, which is that the evidence behind every one of those sections lives in a dozen places: assessment spreadsheets, course files, meeting minutes, a predecessor's inbox. Assembling it into one coherent, cited report, and keeping the thread across a six-year cycle, is the work. That is a system-of-record problem, not a writing problem.

The modern way to produce it

This is where dal.ai fits. The self-study module is built on this exact CAC questionnaire, so the structure is already there. You upload your evidence, and dal.ai drafts the narrative sections from it, citing the source behind every claim. The narrative-heavy parts, like the Students, Objectives, Continuous Improvement, and Curriculum sections, it drafts for your review. The parts that are yours to own, like your outcome definitions, faculty vitae, and the data tables, stay with you. Where the evidence is not there, it does not invent it; it flags the gap so you can fix it before a reviewer finds it. Nothing reaches ABET without your sign-off. You are still the expert. It is your system of record.

Frequently asked questions