The CEAB visiting team will be on your campus for three days. In those three days, they will ask to see evidence you've never pulled together. They will interview faculty who don't know they're on the list. They will spend an evening reading your self-study and decide whether your program deserves accredited status for the next six years.
If you're the Accreditation Coordinator, you know this. And if the visit is coming up, you probably also know the feeling of checking the evidence folder and thinking: "We can't be this unprepared."
This guide breaks down what actually happens during a CEAB visit, what the visiting team is looking for, and how to prepare without burning out your faculty or yourself.
What the Visiting Team Actually Does
The CEAB visiting team typically consists of a Chair, a Secretary, and four to six members — experienced engineers and academics drawn from other Canadian institutions. They follow a structured process defined in the CEAB Manual of Accreditation Procedures, and they use Engineers Canada's Tandem system to manage the visit.
Here's the typical schedule:
- Day 1 morning: Opening meeting with program leadership. The team reviews the self-study report and identifies preliminary areas of interest.
- Day 1 afternoon: Individual interviews with faculty. The team selects courses from your curriculum and asks specific questions about how each course addresses particular indicators.
- Day 2: More interviews, student meetings, and facility walkthroughs. The team may ask to see specific exemplars — lab reports, exam questions, project deliverables — to verify what the self-study claims.
- Day 2 evening: Closed team session. They consolidate their findings, identify strengths and areas for improvement, and begin drafting the visiting team report.
- Day 3: Exit meeting. They share their preliminary observations and answer questions. The formal report comes later, through Engineers Canada.
The key thing to understand: they come prepared with a reading of your self-study. Their questions will test whether the evidence on paper matches what's happening in your classrooms. The more aligned those two things are, the smoother the visit goes.
The Five Things the Visiting Team Will Ask About
Based on the CEAB Accreditation Criteria and common visiting team practices, here are the areas that consistently come up:
1. Curriculum alignment with Graduate Attributes.
They will ask to see your curriculum map — the matrix that shows which courses address which indicators at which competence levels. If it's a spreadsheet, they'll look at it. If it's a connected map they can explore, they'll appreciate it. What they're really checking is whether your program has a coherent plan for developing each Graduate Attribute from first year through graduation.
2. Quality and recency of evidence.
"Show us an exemplar for this indicator." It's the question every Coordinator dreads. They want to see real student work — not a polished portfolio assembled for the visit, but genuine assessment evidence. Rubrics, annotated assignments, exam papers with marks and feedback. The evidence should be current (within the last two to three years) and clearly linked to specific indicators.
3. Continuous improvement in action.
CEAB doesn't just want to see that you meet the criteria — they want to see that you're getting better at it. When have you identified a gap and closed it? How do you use assessment data to improve courses? What mechanisms do you have for curriculum review, and do they actually happen?
4. Faculty engagement and understanding.
In individual interviews, the team will ask faculty members to explain how their courses contribute to specific Graduate Attributes. If the faculty member can't articulate the connection, it signals that the mapping is a coordinator exercise rather than a shared program understanding. The team is looking for faculty who understand accreditation, not just the Coordinator.
5. Resources and infrastructure.
Labs, libraries, computing facilities, industry partnerships, co-op placements. The visiting team will assess whether your program has the infrastructure to deliver the curriculum it claims to deliver. This is usually the easiest category to prepare for because the evidence is visible — but it still needs to be documented and presented coherently.
The Pre-Visit Timeline: What to Do, When
If you have six months before the visit, here's a realistic preparation timeline:
6 months out: Inventory and gap analysis
Review every indicator in your curriculum map. Rate each one as Strong (multiple recent exemplars, clear course alignment), Adequate (some evidence, minor gaps), or At Risk (thin or outdated evidence). Focus your effort on the At Risk indicators first.
4 months out: Evidence collection sprint
Work with each course instructor to gather one or two solid exemplars per mapped indicator. Provide clear instructions: what format, what indicators, what level. This is the step where most Coordinators spend 15 to 20 hours a week chasing faculty. If you have a system that lets faculty upload exemplars when they grade, this step is dramatically shorter.
3 months out: Draft the self-study report
The self-study is your narrative. It should tell the story of your program: what you do, how well you do it, and how you know. It needs to be internally consistent with your evidence map — every claim in the self-study should be backed by evidence the visiting team can find.
2 months out: Internal dry run
Gather a small group — department chair, a couple of senior faculty — and walk through the self-study together. Ask them to challenge every claim. "Where's the evidence for this?" "Is that exemplar recent enough?" "Does this course really address that indicator at the advanced level?" An internal review catches inconsistencies before the visiting team does.
1 month out: Faculty briefing
Every faculty member who will be interviewed should know they're on the list. Brief them on what the visiting team will ask. Share the self-study. Walk them through how their course maps to the indicators. This 30-minute meeting prevents the worst-case scenario: a faculty member being asked about GA 8 and genuinely not knowing what GA 8 is.
1 week out: Logistics
Confirm rooms, schedules, parking, catering. Print physical copies of the self-study for each team member. Prepare an evidence room where exemplars are organised by indicator and clearly labelled. Set up a welcome packet for the visiting team. These details matter because they signal professionalism and preparation.
The Evidence Room: Your Single Biggest Preparation Win
During the visit, the visiting team will spend hours looking at evidence. If they have to ask you to find it, you lose credibility. If it's there, clearly labelled and accessible, you look prepared.
Set up a dedicated room (or at minimum a dedicated cabinet) with binders or digital folders organised by Graduate Attribute and Indicator. Each section should contain:
- The curriculum map showing which courses address this indicator
- One to three exemplars per course, clearly labelled with course code, indicator, and competence level
- A brief index page at the front of each section
The visiting team members will thank you for this. It's not in the manual, but every team member has a preference: spend time evaluating evidence, not searching for it.
What to Do During the Visit
Your role as Coordinator shifts during the visit. You're no longer preparing — you're facilitating.
- Be available but not hovering. The visiting team will want to browse evidence independently. Be close enough to answer questions, far enough to let them work.
- Anticipate questions. If they ask to see evidence for a specific indicator, have it ready within minutes. If you need to search for it, you've lost a point.
- Don't defend — explain. If the team raises a concern, resist the urge to argue. Acknowledge it, explain your perspective, offer additional evidence if you have it. The worst response is "That's not right." The best response is "Let me show you what we have."
- Take notes. Everything the team says during the exit meeting will appear in the formal report. Record it accurately so you can prepare a precise response.
After the Visit: Response and Improvement
The visit doesn't end when the team leaves. You'll receive a formal report from Engineers Canada, typically within a few weeks. Your program will need to submit a written response addressing each finding.
The response should be structured, specific, and time-bound:
- For strengths: Acknowledge and describe how you'll sustain them.
- For areas of improvement: Describe the specific action, the person responsible, and the completion date.
- For critical findings: Provide an immediate action plan and a longer-term remediation strategy.
CEAB reviews your response and makes a final accreditation decision. The timeline from visit to decision is typically two to four months. Use that time to start implementing improvements — don't wait for the formal decision to act.
How to Make Next Time Easier
Here's the most important thing in this entire guide: the preparation work you do for this visit should not be thrown away afterward. Every exemplar you collect, every mapping you verify, every faculty briefing you give — it should become the baseline for your next accreditation cycle.
Programs that rebuild their evidence every six years treat accreditation like a project. Programs that maintain it year-round treat it like part of their normal operations. The workload difference is enormous:
- Cycle-by-cycle preparation: 3 to 4 months of intense work, 10 to 20 hours per week, burning out the Coordinator and the faculty they're chasing.
- Year-round maintenance: 2 to 4 hours per month, steady and predictable. The visit preparation is a review, not a rebuild.
A connected evidence map makes year-round maintenance practical. You can add exemplars as they're produced, update mappings during curriculum reviews, and generate gap reports at any time. By the time the next self-study arrives, you've been preparing for it since the last one ended.
Final Thought
The best-prepared programs don't look prepared during the visit. They look like programs that simply know what they do and can show you. That's the goal. Not a perfect evidence room, but a program that has integrated accreditation into its daily practice.
If that's where you want to be, MapOutcomes can help. We built our platform to make year-round accreditation maintenance the default, not the exception. Book a demo and we'll show you what it looks like.
This guide is based on the CEAB Manual of Accreditation Procedures (2024-2025 edition) and practical experience from Coordinators at Canadian engineering programs. Specific visit schedules and procedures may vary — always check the latest guidance from Engineers Canada and your program's liaison with CEAB.