ABET — Criteria for Accrediting Computing Programs (2026–2027)

The rules a US computing department must satisfy to keep its accreditation, published by ABET’s Computing Accreditation Commission. cs2023 is advice a department may take; this is the document that has consequences if it does not.

What it requires

The general criteria bind every accredited computing program:

• Criterion 5 (curriculum) — at least 30 semester credit hours of computing: techniques and tools, security and privacy principles, computing’s effect on society, and substantial project work. Plus mathematics and statistics “appropriate to the discipline,” and science coursework from outside computing.
• Criterion 3 (student outcomes) — five outcomes every graduate must attain: analyze a complex computing problem; design, implement and evaluate a solution; communicate in professional contexts; “recognize professional responsibilities and make informed judgments in computing practice based on legal and ethical principles”; and function as a member or leader of a team.

A program calling itself computer science takes on more:

• at least 40 semester credit hours of computer science — algorithms, complexity, theory, programming languages, software development, architecture, networking, operating systems, systems across levels of abstraction, and major projects;
• at least 15 semester credit hours of mathematics and statistics, including discrete mathematics, probability and statistics, with “mathematical rigor at least equivalent to introductory calculus”;
• a sixth student outcome: apply computer science theory and software development fundamentals to produce computing-based solutions;
• some full-time faculty holding a PhD in computer science.

The criteria state their own limit in one sentence: “The curriculum requirements specify topics, but do not prescribe specific courses.” Hours and subject areas are mandatory; how a department spends them is not.

The 2026–2027 text went through the Computing Area Delegation’s 180-day public review, opened 24 October 2025 with comments accepted to 15 June 2026, before the delegation settled the adopted content.

Why this spoke needed it

The wiki’s growth edge asked what actually binds a department, and cs2023 could only answer halfway. The guidelines are endorsed by three societies and enforced by nobody; a department that ignores all 270 CS Core hours loses nothing. ABET withdraws accreditation.

Reading the two together is awkward in a way worth recording, because the corpus now holds two prescriptive documents that cannot be compared arithmetically. CS2023 counts topic hours — lecture time attributed to a knowledge unit, 270 of them in the CS Core. ABET counts semester credit hours — units of enrolled course credit, 40 of them in computer science. Neither converts into the other, and nothing in either document maps its own quantity onto the other’s. The one comparison that does hold is direction: both fix a floor of required computing and leave the arrangement to the department.

It also gives the spoke’s founding claim its strongest instance. The standing thesis is that where an assessment regime exists, it shapes scope — argued so far from what curricula include and omit under the pressure of a hiring interview (interview-preparation). ABET is an assessment regime of a different kind: it examines the program, not the candidate, and it is the only one in this corpus with a sanction behind it. What it produces is the scope cs2023 found missing from the repositories — ethics and professional responsibility as a mandatory outcome, teamwork, communication. developer-roadmap, coding-interview-university and awesome-system-design-resources carry none of these, and now the contrast is not between a repository and a recommendation but between a repository and a requirement.

What it still does not answer

The edge wanted evidence that some department’s syllabus conforms to the CS Core. This is not that evidence and cannot become it. ABET publishes criteria and a list of accredited programs; it does not publish per-program findings, and its criteria are its own — an accredited program has satisfied ABET, which nowhere requires CS2023 coverage. So the question splits in two, and only one half is now answerable from this wiki: what must a department do (this page) versus what does any particular department actually teach (still unheld — needs a degree map or an accreditation review).

The corpus’s central hole is untouched, as usual. ABET reports no outcomes either. It specifies hours and attainments and says nothing about whether graduates of programs meeting them do better than graduates of programs that do not — which, for a document that has bound US computing education for decades, is a striking absence to add to the pile.