The Future of Education

The field of cybersecurity has been rapidly developing over the past few years primarily from the quickly changing legal requirements for maintaining privacy and security of assets and their internal sensitive data.  To address the changing computing field, the Accreditation Board for Engineering (ABET) proposed preliminary cybersecurity accreditation criteria a few years ago.  After ABET introduced the preliminary criteria, less than 20 universities have both applied and become ABET Cybersecurity accredited.  This research explores ABET Cybersecurity Assessment perspectives from multiple courses in the Bachelor of Science program at St. John’s University in Queens, New York.  Specifically, this research first examines current published trends on ABET accreditation.  We, then, examine how different ABET assessment criteria, such as the Student Outcomes (SO) and Performance Indicators (PI), are assessed with respect to three core cybersecurity courses in our program: Network Security, Digital Forensics, and Secure Software Development.  These courses were chosen as they introduce the three different perspectives of cybersecurity: development, risk management, and forensics.  Interestingly, the inter-curricular courses are all inter-related; but, each relates to a different perspective within the field.  We also explore how the courses share fundamental cybersecurity ABET assessment topics.  Finally, the paper concludes with both lessons learned, from the ABET assessments, and prospective future cybersecurity assessment research topics.

Keywords: Accreditation Board for Engineering, ABET, Network Security, Secure Software Development, Digital Forensics, Undergraduate Program, New York State.

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