To meet the demands of the SUNY Board of Trustees, UB is taking a different route than most other SUNY schools to measure the quality of its general education programs.
Unlike most SUNY schools, which will collect data every three years, UB has decided to assess its students each year over a three-year period. The details of the assessment have not been decided yet but were debated once again Wednesday at a meeting of the Faculty Senate Executive Committee.
Originally called for by the SUNY Board of Trustees, the assessment is calling for an evaluation of how well students are learning at UB. The General Education Assessment Review has proposed several options for carrying out this seemingly impossible task of judging the learning experience at a university.
Officials agreed that they would eventually need a plan for continuous improvement when it came to general education classes at UB, but without knowing where the university stands, that issue must take a back seat.
One tool that will be useful to the review committee will be the National Survey for Student Engagement, which gauges how involved students are in their own educations.
Smaller universities have been able to establish rubrics for evaluating students' achievement in certain areas before they enter the school and after they've been there for a period of time. Also at smaller schools, faculty members have been able to collect and evaluate portfolios of students' work that span their time at that school.
At a school as large as UB, that would be literally impossible considering the size of the sample that would have to be taken and the amount of time and human resources that would be spend evaluating them.
Another proposal, and perhaps the most well received one, was to give the Graduate Record Exam, or a sample of that test, to a percentage of incoming freshmen and then repeat that testing at least once during their time at UB to see how students have progressed.
Some objections raised to that proposal included the fact that poor GRE scores cannot be removed from one's record like a poor SAT score can be disregarded after a better score on a retake. Also, it's a possibility that students might not be motivated to do well on a three-hour test that they have to take every year. Furthermore, it was pointed out that repeated taking of the GRE may only show improvement on the student's part because they know what to expect on the test, not because of their learning experience at UB.
Most SUNY schools will be sampling 20 percent of a class every three years to monitor improvement by class. UB has decided to conduct its research differently in that no matter what assessment method is chosen, it will be given to a total of 20 percent of students in a class over a three year period so that data is collected each year.
As part of this program, SUNY campuses must tell SUNY what their plan is to carry out this assessment. They must also present the same plans to the Board of Trustees so that the public is aware of how their money is being spent to assess how well the students in the SUNY system are learning.
Photo: Courtesy of Matthew Messina, from the RMBERS' Instagram page
