Measuring Curriculum Alignment across Topical Coverage, Competency, and Cognitive Depth: A Longitudinal Framework Applied to CS2013 and CS2023
A new framework has been developed to measure how well university computer science programs align with international curricular guidelines, specifically CS2013 and CS2023. This human-in-the-loop pipeline represents programs and guidelines as structured corpora, using semantic retrieval to identify course-to-knowledge-unit matches, which are then confirmed by human judgment. Applied longitudinally to one accredited BSc program, the study found that the program covers approximately 50% of knowledge units from both CS2013 and CS2023, with consistent coverage across the decade. While competency articulation remains high, the program's delivery of content at the depth expected by CS2023 has decreased compared to CS2013, indicating a gap related to the newer guideline's increased expectations rather than a program deficiency. AI
IMPACT This framework could help educational institutions better adapt their computer science programs to evolving industry and academic standards.