Examining the Quality Assurance in Engineering Education in Bangladesh

Introduction

The quality assurance aspect of engineering education is highly challenging and crucial in the modern era (Chowdhury et al., 2013). Under the guidance of the University Grants Commission (UGC), each higher education institution in Bangladesh has set up the Institutional Quality Assurance Cell (IQAC) to ensure the quality of higher education. Higher education institutions can achieve quality assurance in engineering education in many ways. For instance, accreditation by national and global agencies can help ensure the quality of engineering education. The Washington Accord, signed in 1989, is a multi-lateral agreement between bodies responsible for accreditation or recognition of tertiary-level engineering qualifications within their jurisdictions who have chosen to work collectively to assist the mobility of professional engineers. Ali et al. (2011) discussed the essential requirement of engineering accreditation under the Washington Accord and its benefits. They uncovered that a minimum fulfillment of the Washington Accord could render an excellent opportunity for third-world countries to provide quality engineering education. It is worth noting that quality assurance in engineering education is a continuous process and must be evaluated and updated with changing circumstances. Li and Lei (2015) studied the quality assurance mechanisms in engineering education with a case study of Purdue University in the United States of America. They found that the concept of continuous quality improvement was not well implemented in the practice of quality assurance.

As the world faces crises on multiple fronts, engineers are at the forefront of tackling the problems alongside professionals from other sectors. Disasters induced by climate change and the adaptation and mitigation of climate change are the most prominent problems, and engineers play a crucial role in solving these problems (Milovanovic et al., 2022). There is an increasing demand for sufficiently skilled engineers who can work toward sustainable development while addressing social and humanitarian needs (Smith et al., 2019). This is a significant shift from the traditional education methods that are still widely applied all across the world, particularly in developing countries (Ahmed et al., 2016).

The quality of the education that graduate engineering students have access to is also a point of major concern as the largely theoretical knowledge may not be sufficient to enter the professional field (Daun et al., 2016; Faizi & Umar, 2021). Engineering graduates need to have interdisciplinary knowledge in order to provide sustainable solutions to emerging problems (Hadgraft & Kolmos, 2020). Underpinning these transformational changes, the role of quality assurance and accreditation cannot be ignored (Chowdhury et al., 2013; Manzoor, 2017).

The engineering education system in Bangladesh possesses a similar curriculum to many other countries, yet it is not mutually recognized due to non-compliance issues related to quality assurance (Alam et al., 2016). In recent years there has been some progress in this regard. However, the mechanism set for quality assurance in Bangladesh is yet to mature, where the formal arrangements for governance and regulation are insufficient and backdated (Alam, 2020). Moreover, the lack of a robust quality assurance framework hinders progress, as Rahnuma (2020) highlights.

With this background, this paper aims to gain insight into the quality assurance agencies and their roles in Bangladesh in relation to engineering education. This is particularly important as the quality assurance aspect in the engineering educational institutions of Bangladesh is still at the inception level, and it is crucial to monitor, assess, and improve the system to make the system effective in the context of Bangladesh.