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Presidents Home Page > Thoughts from the President Dear TAMIU community: Late on Friday afternoon I received from the Southern Association the report of the off-site committee charged with evaluating our compliance report for re-accreditation. You will remember that this document is our opportunity to demonstrate our institutional compliance with the 78 requirements for re-accreditation. Many of you worked very, very hard to put together this report, and your work produced an excellent document that was, on balance, very well received. Of the 78 separate items required for re-accreditation, only eight were judged in need of additional attention. Only two of those eight items were of any broad significance, both related to the matter of on-going evaluation and use of results. The Committee would like more information from us, data to show both that in administrative departments and in academic programs we systematically and regularly assess our work and then use that assessment to make adjustments and changes in our services or programs. On Tuesday, November 30th at 8:30 a.m., we will meet in Room 230 of the Student Center. Deans, chairs, and directors should be present for this meeting, as well as anyone known to chairs or directors to have played a crucial role of this process. Dr. Cass will before we break for Thanksgiving forward to you an example of the matrix required to present this information in a form easy to understand and to grasp. While it does not appear necessary to show the same process for every program and service at the institution, we do need a large and representative sample of what we are about in evaluation and resulting action. Your first thought will probably be that this information is already available in the report. That may be so; however, we must look back over what we have done (or perhaps even add more examples generated subsequent to the drafting of the report) and provide a grid-like response showing first the program or service, then the method of assessment, then the results of the assessment, and the action which followed. You might begin now reflecting upon which programs or services in your department might most easily lend themselves to this additional part of the report, to demonstrate the two-pronged process of evaluation and use of results throughout the University. Again, I thank all of you for the mammoth effort this report required, and congratulate you on the very fine evaluation it received. The additional information needs to be prepared before we break for Christmas. In most cases, you have this data. It is a matter of presenting it in a slightly different manner, with perhaps fuller explanations and examples. Ray
Ray M. Keck, III |