The Provost Reflects on Assessment at UC

With respect to academic assessment, the last several years at Utica College, especially 2016-2017, have been busy, somewhat painful, and incredibly fruitful in terms of developing a meaningful, coherent, and useful system.  I say that with a touch of irony, since I know that Utica College’s faculty members have always assessed their students’ learning and their own success in teaching them, and the College has been a pioneer in some practices, like systematic and regular program reviews, that have become standards in our profession. 

Nonetheless, we have realized for some time that we have not kept pace sufficiently with our colleagues at other institutions in terms of the emerging best professional practices for generating, reporting, and acting on academic assessment data.  So…the last few years have been a heavy lift, getting back up to speed and recapturing our former leadership position.  It would be idle not to admit that one of the spurs to action has been the prospect of our reaccreditation review by Middle States.  But, of course, that is one of the purposes of reaccreditation – to spur institutions on in a process of self-examination and recognition of areas to improve. 

More important, I think, has been the increasing recognition by all of us that, while the national “assessment movement” has been associated with more than its share of hyperbolic rhetoric, it has behind it some very important, and highly academic, values.   As academics, we value evidence.  As academics we value action that is impelled by careful scrutiny of evidence and rational planning based on it.  We value processes that are systematic rather than haphazard and idiosyncratic.  We value progress rather than stagnation, and challenge rather than complacency.   Most importantly, I have never seen a faculty more engaged with and committed to its students than UC’s faculty.  We value being able to bring out the best of ourselves on their behalf. 

My sense is that this is a faculty that may have taken its time shaping a highly formed academic assessment agenda and culture, yet is now rapidly developing a high level of skill in, and sense of the importance of, assessment in achieving our long-standing educational goals.  As assessment processes become more and more embedded in our individual professional lives and in our institutional fabric, we realize increasingly how imperative it is that we engage in effective assessment in order to identify specific areas of weakness and strength.   This positions us to address the current challenges we face and to improve the student experience.   We expect this increasingly of ourselves and of each other, which will not change after the Middle States team leaves.  Very quickly we have become dependent on assessment, a dependency that is both healthy and empowering, and constitutes a resource that we will use increasingly as we pursue our aspirations for our students and ourselves.