University Assessment Council Meeting Minutes
September 23, 2004
10:30 AM – 12:00 PM
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RT 1701
Present: Linda Ammons, Jeffrey Chen, Sandra Emerick, Jeffrey Ford, John Holcomb, Benoy Joseph ,
George Lupone, Peter Meiksins, Mieko Smith, Rosemary Sutton , Vida Svarcas, John Tomko, Peter
Trumpower, Jane Zaharias, and Debra Sudy (Clerk)
Guest: Michael Mina, University Data Administrator
1. Minutes of the April 6, 2004 meeting were reviewed.
2. Welcome G. Kaul welcomed back committee members and welcomed new members: Linda
Ammons, Associate Dean, Law; John Tomko, Interim Associate Dean, Engineering. Barbara
Modney, Associate Dean, COS will join Council as well as a representative from CLASS.
3. TracDat A demo of the assessment management software was scheduled and attended by
several members. It was decided that TracDat would not meet CSU’s needs at this time.
4. Update on Summer Activities R. Sutton reported that 104 reports have been reviewed by
review teams. About 20 programs have not submitted reports for review yet. R. Sutton will
call for volunteers again to complete the remaining reports. Special thanks to V. Svarcas, P.
Trumpower and J. Chen for attending all three review days. The review this summer was
administered under new, more explicit and systematic review procedures. R. Sutton asked for
suggestions and comments on the review process: P. Meiksins commented that there were a
number of questions on the review form that were impossible to answer with the materials
provided; S. Emerick would like to see cues at the top of each column for those filling out
forms. V. Svarcas stated that the web forms were terrific (and several members offered
accolades to E. Brown for their creation.) G. Lupone added that he appreciated the reports the
reviewers generated which help generate new ideas. B. Joseph agreed that the reports were
very educational and informative.
5. Web site progress B. Joseph remarked that several persons in his area have been unable to
gain access, and with staff turnover or special committees, etc. access becomes problematic. G.
Kaul will ask M. Mina to follow-up with possible solutions. R. Sutton stated that the problem
is not totally fixable due to the fact that MACs and at-home/off campus computers are unable
to access the web pages. S. Emerick asked for guidance for providing last year’s and the
previous year’s stats to units. R. Sutton responded that it is an evolving process and hopefully
they’ll read that in the reports. Several model reports are available on the web including the
University Library, which is a great example. Some of the site has been cleaned up but there
are still problems to resolve. In researching other university web pages, R. Sutton noted two
kinds of content: what is assessment and links; and administrative procedures at that
institution. The administrative procedures at CSU were provided in a handout to the
committee and will be posted on the web.
R. Sutton asked Council if access to the web pages should be internal to CSU or made public
and how long should reports stay up? G. Kaul mentioned that Ohio University reports were
open for public viewing with no one receiving comments from external sources; but suggested
contacting departments to see what sensitivities there might be to the idea. P. Meiksins asked
Council to consider what the purpose of assessment is as well as the effect/benefit of making
documents public and to consider how it may impact the writing of the assessment report
(knowing it may be publicly viewed by constituents.) G. Kaul responded that for assessment
we don’t expect a perfect process, but progress and a means for accountability. No institution
has a perfect mechanism. We are committed to ongoing improvement. J. Ford added that he
didn’t think too many people would take the time to read the documents but if made public
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people may feel inhibited about clearly defining problems. B. Joseph noted that public access
would be helpful for accrediting agencies who could view them but maybe that could be done
another way instead of public access.
R. Sutton noted that the advantage of public access would be to help resolve the problem of
staff unable to find old documents. The current access is limited and R. Sutton suggests to go
to a broader access for CSU personnel through CSU’s Internal Pages. P. Trumpower suggested
to do it as an email attachment and put it up on the website as a PDF file organized by year or
area. He noted that he does not use the report forms on the website. G. Kaul noted that internal
access (not public) seems to have more consensus among council members. P. Meiksins
reiterated that it has to be made clear why documents are being made public on the website. J.
Ford added that we need to distinguish between assessing assessment activities vs assessing
assessment. G. Kaul added that we need to have the website ready for NCA and access on the
web would be to our advantage. S. Emerick suggested that with an extensive website NCA
would consider it part of our culture. P. Meiksins added that the two views would be (1) the
department goals and how we assess them, vs (2) the report of how we did last year – which is
a potentially dangerous area. R. Sutton suggested publicly posting the goals and examples but
keep the reports internal.
6. Assessment Information for Dept Chairs 2004 Document R. Sutton asked associate deans
to distribute the document to relevant people in their areas and added that new guidelines will
be developed for the next review cycle. J. Zaharias suggested posting the document on the web
for easy access. L. Ammons noted, looking at the guidelines, that Law might not fit into the
schema (having no departments and only one program and, in essence, one exam.) R. Sutton
agreed and will research other Law Colleges for examples to provide a better guide for Law.
7. NCA Deadline G. Kaul stated that the NCA deadline is September 2005. J. Zaharias asked
which previous 2 years would be required in the reports. G. Kaul responded that it would be
the last two years. J. Zaharias noted that this would give a limited time between May and
September for inclusion in a report. R. Sutton offered the Council a warning that the first half
of summer would be a very busy one for everyone. G. Kaul noted that we have some flexibility
on how we put this together but need to include GenEd assessment and assessment of the major
and individual programs. G. Kaul will develop a report template and bring it to a future
meeting.
Gen Ed assessment progress P. Meiksins asked if we have English 101 and 102 (GenEd
assessment). G. Kaul responded that last year we concentrated on Social Sciences and Western
Culture and Civilizations. J. Ford noted that those are significant steps and continued efforts
include an all-day GenEd retreat for October 2, 2004 and intra-activities to experiment with
GenEd. G. Kaul added that she is not uncomfortable with where we are with GenEd
assessment currently. We will administer the Academic Profile which will look at all GenEd
coursework. P. Meiksins said that it would be politic to have UCC look at the test and
suggested that students be assigned to answer only meaningful portions of the test. G. Kaul
responded that she would furnish him with samples of the test. V. Svarcas noted that students
were paid to take the test last time. J. Ford noted that many students do not complete general
education courses at CSU and the results of the last profile were very upsetting. R. Sutton
responded that it is not that we would get answers we want but that we do it. J. Holcomb asked
if we could administer it stratified by college? J. Chen responded that the associate deans
should review it first but there are two forms (55min. short form and 3 hour long form). The
short form is $12-14 per student and the long is $17-18 per student. G. Kaul noted that our
students may not do as well as the national norm but it is what we do with the results that NCA
will look at. At this point we have enough in GenEd that it would be simpler to use the survey.
Incentives would have two parts: $15-20 for taking the test and $15-20 for good performance
as an incentive to have students do well. G. Kaul suggested two groups: (1) students who
began at CSU and completed all coursework at CSU, and (2) students with extra Gen Ed
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10/28/2004 1:21 PM
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coursework. B. Joseph noted that at another institution a website had been used for students to
practice (to help enable better scoring.) P. Meiksins added that once we administer the test, the
next question NCA will ask is what you did/plan to do with the results. J. Holcomb suggested
investigating benchmarks of other universities and to be mindful of the sample size to discern
an issue. J. Chen suggested that approx. 100 persons are recommended with the short form. G.
Kaul stated that she would capture the discussion and email this to Council for feedback before
sending it on to UCC.
8. Alumni Survey M. Mina reported on a project to centralize the alumni survey efforts on
campus under the overview of the Institutional Research department. A list is available at the
project portal: http://www.csuohio.edu/uda/alumnisurvey.html According to M. Mina,
although anyone may view the list, unless previously granted access to the Assessment System,
the links will not open. It was discovered that there are a diverse set of alumni surveys and not
too much in the way of common questions or patterns. B. Spiker, University Advancement, is
willing to adopt a global resource for handling the surveys more efficiently. Currently M. Mina
is researching what specific questions departments would want in an alumni survey.
G. Kaul noted that some, like the College of Education and Human Services have multiple
surveys and may/may not want to participate. J. Ford asked if the surveys would be made
available on-line. B. Joseph suggested that rather than operating out of IR we should look into
the benefit of outsourcing administration of the survey(s) such as with EBI. G. Kaul responded
that we would have a web front but would like to maintain more control over the administration
for now. P. Meiksins suggested that telephone surveys may be a better route and could be
handled via School of Communications (Leo Jeffres) by students. L. Ammons stated that the
College of Law’s surveys are done by US News and other than that the college hasn’t done a
major survey in some time. She noted that it is important to have a good database otherwise
surveying is a waste of resources. G. Kaul asked Council to think about how they might want to
participate or not participate in an alumni survey effort.
9. Other Business: none
Next meeting: October 28, 2004, 10:30 am – 12:00 pm, RT 1701
AC minutes 9.23.04
10/28/2004 1:21 PM