Unlike other advanced countries, the university of our country is mainly realized by the system based on private universities. In this situation, incorporating national universities next year, national universities face the turning point which is considered how they will be. After considering the balance of local arrangement, learning field and the number of faculties and graduate schools, it is clear that the incorporation of National University is necessary. Moreover, three elements [the management reform, Horizontal Funding System of universities, and the guarantee of the quality of Japanese universities in international society] are very important for aiming at the independency of a university and improvement of its quality. Starting university reform from these viewpoints is directly connected with the state of the university in our country.

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The Japan Accreditation Board for Engineering Education : JABEE was founded in Nov. 1999, and launched into the practice in 2002. A new way has been opened for us to commit to the international coalition of higher education of engineering. Taking the opportunity, a backward glance and a foreseeing perspective on the engineering education in Japan are presented.

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Recent trends in evaluation for higher education and education reform are discussed from a variety of viewpoints. Then this paper points out tasks in engineering education. Application of TQM method in higher education is recommended under the cooperation between academia and industry.

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Course evaluation and improvement are important processes for the quality management of higher engineering education. Faculty of Engineering in Kumamoto University has implemented the evaluation and improvement using two methods. One is a course evaluation due to the students' voting, in which electro-questionaries are used with university LAN. This voting system prepared various conveniences to the faculty members and students such as the preparation works, analyses and voting circumstances. Another one is the teaching award elected by all students. Seven best teachers in seven departments were selected by their higher teaching skills and performance in their classes. Their techniques were also informed to all faculty members in the faculty reports, which were useful for the course evaluation and improvement.

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Many college learners have apparently difficulty developing well-organized learning strategies backed by their well-established, consistent way of thinking. A major reason can be attributed to their lack of metacognitive skills (i.e., the process of self-monitoring, such as planning, performing, testing and evaluating) based on thorough selfreflection. Meanwhile, it is suggested that most of them have never experienced autonomous learning practices. Rote learning and mechanical way of teaching confine themselves to the level of extrinsic learning motivation. An English course, which emphasizes creativity and self-reflection leading to consistent learning activities, has therefore been introduced to foster intrinsic learning motivation. The experiential learning-oriented course aims to assist adolescents develop their problem solving skills to survive in today's evolving, complicated society.

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From a historical viewpoint, ethics is strongly affected by social changes. "Time-dependent Ethics" is defined based on historical experiences. The changes in ethics and the purpose of the higher engineer's education in Japan after the Meiji period and in the United States after World War II are described. Ethics and the purpose of education have undergone drastic changes every 30 years or so in Japan, in which the ethics followed until then was completely denied in the follow-ing 30 years and the teachers faithfully followed the new one. Therefore, the lectured items in engineering ethics should not be the direct targets of engineering such as "Military Abundance, " "Mass Production" and "Environmental Conservation, " but should be mo0re general concepts of ethics. Furthermore, considering the characteristic nature of society and engineering that always want to create changes, the education of engineering ethics must make an effort to be in harmony with the inherent changes in academic and social activities.

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In the normal teaching course, the effect of teaching and learning is evaluated by the examination. After the examination, the teachers will grade the examination paper and give the analysis report of the result. The traditional grading process is laborious and inefficient. The paper proposes and develops a grading system based on network, which can grade the score according to different kind of questions. For the selective questions, the system scans the paper, grades the score automatically and stores the results into the grade database. For the descriptive questions, the system allows teachers estimate the paper in the network environment by the aid of the management system after an electronic paper is made by scanning the paper in high speed. In order to verify the efficiency of the system, 20 teachers used the system to grade the examination paper, and eval-uated the system in 9 aspects. The statistic and analysis of the evaluation proves that the system is efficient and convenient.

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One of the most important and effective methods for studying is that students themselves plan and study what they want to study. However, the most of contents of study are presented beforehand for most of courses in typical universities, where students are only permitted to select them. Authors wished to create a course that can encourage and support studies of active students who have what they want to study. The authors developed a novel course called "a special course for active students" five years before. This paper shows the developed framework and the actual management and some examples of activities of the course.

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The School of Science and Engineering of Kinki University conducts a survey with a questionnaire given to all students at the end of every semester. The aim of this survey is to improve the teaching system by assessing the level, atmosphere of each class and enthusiasm of instructors from students' viewpoints. In other words, the aim is to enhance educative effects by establishing meaningful relations between students and instructors. To verify the effectiveness of the current survey with a questionnaire, this paper presents the statistical discussion using multivariate analysis. The data used here are the evaluations by sophomores, who studied the Analysis for Statistical Data at the department of industrial management. The analysis adopted here are Multiple Regression Analysis and Principal Component Analysis. The resulted multiple regression model has clarified the relationship between the methods of teaching and students evaluation. Also since the usage of the Principal Component Analysis has identified how students' evaluations had been reflected on the questionnaires results, the useful information to improve the teaching systems could be obtained.

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