Does ABET Accreditation Influence the Representation of Women in CS Programs?
This program is tentative and subject to change.
Curricular analytics can help researchers in computer science education understand the structural barriers preventing students from discovering and completing the major, especially those underrepresented in tech. Prior research has found that an inverse relationship between curricular complexity and percent of graduates who identify as women. This study expands upon previous research by focusing on the impact that ABET accredited programs have on complexity and representation of women. Curricular maps of a total of 80 schools, 40 ABET and 40 non-ABET, were created to obtain complexity metrics. Initial findings show that the lower bounds complexity score for ABET accredited programs is 150, which is higher than the average of 109 for non-ABET programs. Further, non-ABET programs, on average, have a higher degree of representation of women (33% compared to 21%). This poster discusses the use of curricular analytics, our preliminary findings, and further questions to be addressed as part of this work.