1. How to Successfully Fail at the Assessment Process: Ms. Margaret Fain : Director of Core Curriculum, Coastal Carolina University Dr. Teresa Burns, past Director of Core Curriculum, Coastal Carolina University Dr. David St.John, City Colleges of Chicago AACU Conference, March 2, 2013

2. Coastal Carolina University 8,000 students Public: bachelors and masters program Located in rural SC, 10 miles inland from resort area of Myrtle Beach, SC

3. City Colleges of Chicago Seven independently accredited Colleges Public: Associates Degrees and Certificates Malcolm X College is the flagship Health Science Career College in Chicago, located in a dense urban area near the Medical District

4. Core Curriculum Assessment at CCU New Core, begun in 2007. SLOs written with no thought of how to assess. Accreditation visit in 2010. Issues: Lack of buy-in for assessment from faculty. Lack of experience in creating assessment tools. Lack of experience in closing the loop.

5. Gen Ed Assessment at MXC Assessment Committee Founded in 2007 in response to Accreditation Visit Outcomes and methods of assessment were built entirely from scratch Issues: – Lack of experienced leadership and expertise – Low faculty buy-in and awareness

6. Failures of Assessment: Lack of a cohesive Assessment program. – Impact on accreditation process. Lack of a culture of assessment. – Hard to create initial buy-in when assessment is viewed as driven by accreditation, not student learning.

7. Failures of Assessment: Use of standardized assessments that did not provide meaningful assessment of slos ( and cost a lot of money). – Results were confusing and hard to interpret in a way that could inform teaching. In-house assessments that measured qualitative data only. – Reliability of results was questionable.

8. How would you: use the data to increase faculty ownership and create buy-in for assessment? present the data to an external accrediting body? revise the process of data collection to make the results easier to interpret and more meaningful. revise the process of data collection to make the work more manageable and the results more reliable.

9. Strategies for spin: Use national data as an overview of trends. Example: MXC Standardized testing data was normed against a mean of 60 and standard deviation of 5-6. This confused faculty who thought scores in the 60s were poor! Use multi-year data to spotlight trends.

10. Incorporate data from multiple sources: exit surveys, department assessments. Use the experience to identify institutional strengths. Example: MXC faculty work best in individual departments, while large centralized efforts are less likely to yield useful results.

11. In summary Dont be afraid to fail. Use as a learning experience.