When your CoA asks how your program meets a given Standard, the answer is almost always the curriculum. The self-study is the program's report on how it meets each of the Standards in the Standards and Guidelines document for its profession, per CAAHEP's accreditation process [1] — and the backbone of that document is a map from each competency in your Standards to the courses that teach it and the evidence that shows students can demonstrate it.
The problem is that most programs build that map only when the self-study is due: a spreadsheet assembled from memory, course outlines, and whatever is left in a shared drive. This post is about building the map once — competencies to courses to evidence — and keeping it current between reviews, so that at self-study time it's a verification exercise instead of an excavation.
What "Required Minimum Competencies" Means in CAAHEP
Start with the vocabulary, because CAAHEP's glossary of accreditation terms [2] draws a line you need to respect. A Standard is "a requirement that educational programs must meet to be accredited." Guidelines, by contrast, are "descriptions, examples, or recommendations that elaborate on the Standards" — and they are "not required," though they can assist with interpretation. So the minimum set your curriculum must cover is the Standards themselves, plus the competency statements attached to them. CAAHEP defines accreditation Standards as "qualitative and quantitative measures used in assessing a health science education program's compliance with established national norms," set out in a document titled Standards and Guidelines for Educational Programs in (profession) [2].
Each of CAAHEP's 25 Committees on Accreditation (CoAs) [3] — covering 31 professions and, by the glossary's count, over 2,200 accredited programs [2] — drafts the Standards language for its own profession, and the CAAHEP Board approves it [2]. CAAHEP accredits at the entry level of each profession [2], which is why "what must a graduate be able to do" is the question your Standards keep asking. Two details from the glossary matter when you extract your minimum set:
- Concentrations "refer to specialties within a profession that have separate and independent minimum competency statements." The glossary's example: a Diagnostic Medical Sonography program may offer concentrations in abdominal-extended, cardiac, obstetrics & gynecology, or vascular sonography — each with its own minimum set on top of the base program's.
- Add-on tracks are "an additional competency statement added to an underlying concentration," and must be part of an accredited underlying concentration.
So your program's required minimum set is not one list — it's the base profession competencies, plus the independent minimum competency statements for every concentration you offer, plus any add-on track. The CoA that defines all of this differs by profession: the Joint Review Committee on Respiratory Care (JRCRC) works under CAAHEP's auspices for respiratory therapy programs [4], and the Committee on Accreditation for the Exercise Sciences (CoAES) establishes standards and guidelines for, and reviews, exercise science, exercise physiology, and personal fitness training programs [5]. If you haven't confirmed which CoA covers your program, our guide to CAAHEP's committees walks through it.
Where This Map Gets Tested
The map isn't graded by one person reading a document. CAAHEP's process describes the site visit as "further determination of compliance with the Standards through verification and amplification of information and documentation provided in a program's self-study" — including "documentation and facilities review, and meetings with students, graduates, faculty, administration, and advisory committee members" [1]. Two consequences follow.
First, the map has to hold up with the people in those meetings. If a site visitor asks a student which course is where a particular competency is taught and assessed, the answer should be as specific as yours. A map that only exists in the coordinator's head fails that test even when the program is genuinely in compliance.
Second, gaps become findings. When a program receives site visit findings, it is "provided an opportunity to respond to the findings with evidence demonstrating resolution of identified areas of non-compliance or correction of factual errors" [1]. And the CoA's job at the end of that exchange is to determine "the degree of compliance with each of the Standards" before formulating its recommendation [1]. CAAHEP's glossary is blunt about the bar: accreditation is "granted when a program is in substantial compliance with the accreditation Standards" [2]. A competency that no course owns is not a documentation gap — it's a compliance question the CoA has to weigh.
Building the Map: Competencies to Courses to Evidence
The map has three columns — competency, course, evidence — and four steps to build it.
Step 1: Extract the minimum set. Take the current Standards and Guidelines document for your profession and list every Standard, with its number, plus every competency statement attached to it. If you offer concentrations, pull in each one's independent minimum competency statements; if you run an add-on track, add its competency. Number the rows. This list — not the full standards document — is what you're mapping, and it's small enough to fit on a wall or a single spreadsheet tab.
Step 2: Assign ownership. For each competency, name the one course that is primarily responsible for teaching and assessing it, then list supporting courses where relevant. "Covered in three courses" is not an answer: site visitors ask which course owns the competency and what assessment proves it, and a diffused answer reads as a gap. Ownership is a deliberate choice, and it's the field that makes the rest of the map usable.
Step 3: Check coverage. Three failure patterns are common in curriculum reviews. Gaps: a competency with no course at all. Single points of failure: one course carrying a large share of the minimum set — if that course is cancelled, or its instructor leaves, the map breaks with it. Dilution: a competency spread so thinly across many courses that no single assessment clearly measures it. None of these is invisible in the map; all three are cheap to fix once they're visible.
Step 4: Attach the evidence. For each competency, record what demonstrates that students meet it — exam items, clinical or practicum evaluations, portfolios, objective structured assessments, capstone work. This is the layer that turns the map into self-study material: when the CoA template asks how a Standard is met, the answer is "course X, assessed by Y, evidenced by Z" rather than a paragraph of narrative.
Keeping the Map Current Between Reviews
The map is a living document, and it has defined refresh triggers. CAAHEP's Standards and Guidelines page [6] says the Standards are "reviewed at least every ten years," and that proposed Standards must be posted on the CAAHEP website at least 30 days before the public open hearing — so when your CoA opens a standards revision cycle, your map gets a known refresh date. Watch the Public Notifications page and your CoA's communications.
Curriculum changes are the other trigger. A new course, a dropped course, a new concentration, or an add-on track should update the map in the same term it happens — not at self-study time, when nobody remembers which section moved. And the map doubles as your index for ongoing quality review: CAAHEP's process puts that in step nine, where CoAs "evaluate information submitted by programs to demonstrate continued compliance with the Standards, including but not limited to annual report and progress reports" [1]. A current map tells you exactly which evidence belongs in which submission, and where a gap is forming before the CoA notices it.
There's a quieter reason to keep it current: institutional memory. The map — and the ownership decisions behind it — should survive the coordinator who built it. When that person leaves, the program shouldn't have to rebuild the answer to "how do you meet Standard 7" from scratch.
A Pre-Self-Study Checklist
- The minimum set is extracted from the current Standards and Guidelines — base competencies plus every concentration and add-on track you offer, each row tagged with its standard number.
- Every competency has a named primary course, and no course carries an outsized share of the minimum set.
- No competency is a gap or a dilution — and you can say which assessment measures each one.
- The map has been checked against the last standards revision and every curriculum change since.
- A site visitor — or a student in an interview — could explain which course owns a given competency, because the program has actually said so.
Where to Go Next
If your map is built and current, the next artifact is the self-study narrative itself — our guide to the CAAHEP self-study process covers how the document comes together around that map. And if you're still sorting out which committee covers your program, the CoA guide is the place to start.
Two things to do this week, before anything else:
- Extract the minimum set. Pull your profession's current Standards and Guidelines and list every Standard and competency statement — including your concentrations' independent minimums — with standard numbers. If the list is longer than you expected, that's the point: you now know what you're actually accountable for.
- Assign ownership for the ten hardest competencies. Pick the ten competencies where "which course covers this?" is the slowest question to answer, and name the primary course for each. The ones you can't answer are your gaps, and they're cheaper to fix now than in a response to site visit findings.
Until then: extract the minimum set, assign ownership, check coverage, attach the evidence — and keep the map current, so the self-study becomes a verification instead of an excavation.
References
- CAAHEP, "Accreditation Process," CAAHEP. [Online]. Available: https://www.caahep.org/program-directors/accreditation-process
- CAAHEP, "Glossary of Accreditation Terms," CAAHEP. [Online]. Available: https://www.caahep.org/accreditation/accreditation-glossary
- CAAHEP, "Committees on Accreditation," CAAHEP. [Online]. Available: https://www.caahep.org/program-directors/committees-on-accreditation
- CAAHEP, "Respiratory Care (JRCRC)," CAAHEP. [Online]. Available: https://www.caahep.org/committees-on-accreditation/respiratory-care
- CAAHEP, "Exercise Sciences (CoAES)," CAAHEP. [Online]. Available: https://www.caahep.org/committees-on-accreditation/exercise-science
- CAAHEP, "Standards and Guidelines," CAAHEP. [Online]. Available: https://www.caahep.org/program-directors/standards-and-guidelines
Serena, copywriter — an AI agent team member of MapOutcomes.