The Coordinator's Guide to CEAB Visit Preparation

The CEAB visiting team will be on your campus for about three days [1]. In that time, they will ask to see evidence you've never pulled together. They will interview faculty who don't know they're on the list. Their findings go into a report that the Accreditation Board uses to decide whether your program is accredited, for a term of up to six years [2].

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 is made up of a chair, a vice-chair, and program visitors for each program being assessed [1] — experienced engineers and academics. They follow a structured process defined in the CEAB Manual of Accreditation Procedures, and visit materials are submitted electronically through Tandem, Engineers Canada's online platform, eight weeks before the visit [1].

Here's the typical shape of the visit, as described in the Manual. Your own schedule is set with the visiting team chair ahead of time [1]:

• Day 1 morning: The whole team meets with the dean and the department heads (or equivalents) to confirm schedules. Team members then start their individual assignments, beginning with a private meeting with the appropriate department head.
• Throughout the visit: Interviews with senior administrators, individual faculty members and groups of faculty, and individual students and student groups; tours of laboratories, libraries and computing facilities; and review of documents you have assembled for them, such as course outlines, test and examination papers, laboratory reports and senior projects.
• Each evening: A closed team session. Members review their findings with one another and cross-check anything unusual.
• Day 2 and 3 mornings: The chair meets with program leadership to discuss early findings and request any schedule adjustments.
• Day 3 afternoon: The team agrees its findings and gives the dean (and others the dean invites) a verbal exit statement of about an hour. The formal report comes later, through Engineers Canada.

The key thing to understand: team members review your submitted documentation before the visit [1], so they arrive with questions. Those 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 general coordinator experience, these are the areas to be ready for:

1. Curriculum alignment with Graduate Attributes.

The criteria call for documented curriculum maps [2], so expect to be asked for yours — 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. As a matter of good practice, keep evidence current (roughly the last two to three years) and clearly linked to specific indicators. The criteria ask for assessment results for all twelve attributes within six years or less [2], but fresher evidence is easier to defend.

3. Continuous improvement in action.

Criterion 3.2 (continual improvement) expects processes that apply assessment results to the further development of the program, and a demonstration that they have led to specific improvement actions [2]. 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 and the other resources your program relies on. The visiting team tours these facilities [1] and 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 many Coordinators spend a large share of their 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. Have a printed evidence index ready 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 Manual lists reviewing documents assembled by the institution as one of the visit's core activities [1]. Visiting team members generally prefer to spend their 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. The exit statement is the team's verbal summary of its findings, and the Manual says the report should ideally contain no major findings that were not mentioned there [1]. 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. The visiting team chair prepares the report with the CEAB Secretariat. After editing, it is sent to the Dean for comment on accuracy and completeness, which is also your chance to describe improvements being implemented in the current academic year [1]. Plan to respond to each finding.

As a practical matter, a strong response is 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 serious concerns: Provide an immediate action plan and a longer-term remediation strategy.

The Accreditation Board makes the accreditation decision. It normally holds its decision meeting for visits in June of each year, though decisions may be made at any meeting, and the Dean can provide final clarifications or updates at least two weeks before the decision meeting [1]. Use the time in between 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 accreditation cycle 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: months of intense, concentrated work that can burn out the Coordinator and the faculty they're chasing.
• Year-round maintenance: a small, steady, predictable amount of work each month. 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 draws on the CEAB Manual of Accreditation Procedures and the Accreditation Criteria and Procedures (see References) and on general coordinator practice. Specific visit schedules and procedures may vary — always check the latest guidance from Engineers Canada and your program's liaison with CEAB.

References

1. Engineers Canada, "Manual of Accreditation Procedures," Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board, Engineers Canada, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://engineerscanada.ca/sites/default/files/2024-09/Manual%20of%20Accreditation%20Procedures%202025-2026-EN.pdf
2. Engineers Canada, "2024 Accreditation Criteria and Procedures," Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board, Engineers Canada, Nov. 2024. [Online]. Available: https://engineerscanada.ca/sites/default/files/2024-11/Accreditation_Criteria_Procedures_2024.pdf