Richard Tarara is quite correct that NCA does not require exit exams as
part of their demands for increased assessment. Many people are
turning to exit exams because exit exams appear (I think erroneously)
to be an easy solution to assessment demands.
Unfortunately this poor thinking is sometimes mandated locally. The
Bluffton College administration appointed a "Director of Assessment"
and the faculty elected an assessment committee to work with the
director. Every department (actually every major) has to have an
assessment plan approved by this internal committee. Thus, it is our
own internal committee and director who are demanding nationally-normed
exit exams.
I second Stan Dodd's request that Richard Tarara share his department's
assessment plan if possible. Any time we are able to show our
committee that a reputable school is doing reasonable assessment with
an easier plan than ours, we seem to make some progress. But our
committee only seems flexible if some other school has crawled out on
the limb before us.
Here is an example. Our committee felt we needed to assess how well we
teach science students to write lab reports. They viewed that the best
way to do this was via portfolios of lab reports collected over a
student's four years here. We objected... it's time consuming to grade
reports once... we don't want to have to read and evaluate them a
second time. We feel that the original lab report grading is valid
assessment. But our director tried to state that the normal grading
that takes place within a class does not qualify as assessment
according to NCA. Then we found a school that has had their assessment
program approved by NCA, and they routinely use grades on things such
as lab reports in their assessment process. We asked NCA some specific
questions about this and essentially found that NCA does not have many
hard and fast rules. Our director now is allowing us to state that we
are demonstrating students learn to write lab reports if the average
student's lab report grade stays steady or improves. Implicit here is
the idea that we demand better/more for a senior-level lab report than
for a freshman-level report. Hence, if the average student gets a B+
grade on reports as a freshman, and still gets B+ grades as a senior,
they are improving.
Viewed in this way, assessing lab report writing is not a matter of
developing portfolios or other evaluation techniques, rather, it is
assessing if our lab-report requirements are appropriate for the grade
level, and if our grading is appropriately applied. This type of
assessment does not bother me because any good teacher and department
ought to be asking these questions anyway. So now we jointly (i.e.
department-wide) agree what features a freshman through senior lab
report ought to contain, and we write this down both for ourselves and
for the students. We also discuss (at least annually) how our students
are measuring up to this standard, what grading problems we have, what
specific problem areas do students have, and what can we do about these
problem areas. (We take minutes at these meetings.) Isn't that what
assessment is supposed to be about?
Michael D. Edmiston, Ph.D. Phone/voice-mail: 419-358-3270
Professor of Chemistry & Physics FAX: 419-358-3323
Chairman, Science Department E-Mail edmiston@bluffton.edu
Bluffton College
280 West College Avenue
Bluffton, OH 45817