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Program Review and Assessment
Program review begins with a thorough analysis of a department’s or program’s mission statement. All programmatic requirements should reflect this statement. If they do not, then faculty should review both the mission statement as well as the requirements.
Learning the departmental assessment plan
plan as well as an assessment committee. This committee should be charged with devising and administering the assessment instruments called for by departmental plans. This committee should collect data.
Converting assessment data into program change
Assessment committees send data to other appropriate departmental committees for analysis and interpretation. After this analysis, committees should recommend appropriate changes. Both the data and the changes based on data are vital parts of a department’s annual report and are necessary for SACS’ documentation.
Proposing/deleting courses and tracks
After their analyses of assessment data, departments may decide to make some curricular changes. To propose or delete courses or tracks, departmental committees should make recommendations to departments for their formal approvals. After departments approve these changes, department heads complete appropriate forms, which must be signed by both proposing faculty members and department heads. This form should then be submitted to the Dean’s office for consideration by the Arts and Sciences Executive Committee. After the Executive Committee accepts these changes, the Dean sends them to the Academic Committee. The Graduate Executive Committee, however, must first approve proposals for graduate courses. From the Academic Committee all course proposals move to the agenda of the Faculty Senate. These proposals then become policy on the effective date requested on them. Department heads and directors should save all paperwork on course proposals; it proves helpful when they both submit and proofread catalogue revisions.