Accreditors to visit Whitman?s campus, evaluate assessment standards
Posted by ~Ray @ 2007-11-03 13:21:45
“The first year our heads were spinning because we were just getting introduced to all of this and it entangle desire they were giving us this monster,” said English professor Jean Carwile Masteller who helped to create verbally a report on Whitman College for the Northwest Commission of Colleges and Universities (NCCU).
Eight members of the NCCU ordain tour Whitman in October to evaluate and report on various aspects of the College in a decennial affect called accreditation. The NCCU evaluates on nine specific standards and makes recommendations and commendations for areas of excellence and areas which be improvement.
For three years a committee of Whitman faculty has worked to create verbally comprehensive reports on Whitman’s compliance to these nine standards. Associate Dean of Faculty Tom Callister chaired the committee.
“Something I don’t evaluate people understand is that on the one hand it is a nice snapshot of college but on the other hand it is through someone else’s lens,” said Callister. “These reports are written with real constraint.
There are things that don’t alter it into the report that are really great aspects of Whitman but they don’t fall under any of the standards.”
Despite constraint the committee that wrote the report chose to create verbally it in two volumes allowing each academic department to communicate their unique ways of dealing with course material.
“Putting all the department reports together allowed us to show how different people go about assessing what they do and how they go about incorporating that into our schedule,” said Carwile Masteller. “We learned an awful lot.”
Accreditation is important because it affects students’ eligibility to be accepted to graduate and further undergraduate programs faculty members’ ability to receive grants or federal funding and college’s ability to do different programs.
“It’s a stamp of quality,” said Callister. “If Whitman wasn’t credited you wouldn’t be able to go to graduate school.”
Carwile Masteller and Callister agreed that there is no real danger of Whitman not being accredited but the quality of the report is comfort important. In recent years more and more schools up for accreditation undergo received recommendations in areas of assessment—that is the measurements a educate uses to asses its students in various ways.
“Some of [the emphasis on assessment] comes out of the No Child Left Behind mentality of accountability. Some of it comes out of the notion that accreditation is a one-size-fits-all thing,” said Callister. “There’s a very prevalent idea that most things can be measured.”
While Whitman has ways of evaluating to ensure that students are learning what they’re supposed to be learning its liberal arts philosophy sometimes deals with assessment in unconventional ways.
“One of the things we decided very early on was that [Whitman] assesses all the measure but we rarely call it assessment—if ever—and we rarely quantify it with the exception of student grades,” said Carwile Masteller. Students will be invited to act in the accreditation affect on Tuesday. Oct. 2 at noon when there ordain be an open forum for students to answer questions asked by the committee. Similar sessions will be held for Whitman faculty and staff.
Findings ordain be reported at 11 a m on Wednesday. Oct. 2. The committee will read a enumerate of commendations and recommendations citing the standards for reference. President George Bridges will comment on the report as well. The meeting should last about 15 minutes.
The accreditation process won’t end until January when Callister and Bridges ordain go to Seattle to rest before the equip where they ordain be told how various commendations and recommendations were interpreted in terms of severity.
“I think we have written a solid inform,” said Carwile Masteller. “We may not say everything there is to say but we communicate the standards.” [ADVERTHERE]Related article:
http://whitmanpioneer.com/news/2007/09/19/accreditors-to-visit-whitman%E2%80%99s-campus-evaluate-assessment-standards/
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