Department Program Assessment

Let me emphasize upfront that we are trying to minimize the effect any of the process described below has on our contingent faculty, which is the vast majority of the department.

NJCU was criticized by her accreditors for not properly evaluating the success of her programs. Such evaluation, unfortunately, is significant work. It requires identifying department specific learning benchmarks and then assessing whether our majors and minors are meeting those benchmarks. It also requires taking steps to remedy any problems that come to light during the assessment.

It’s unclear what remedies would be available given our limited resources, but since we have no choice but to participate in this exercise, we want to ensure our students end up benefitting. The results might, at least, help us to identify whether we should change the way we are teaching any of our courses.

We are currently in the process of developing department benchmarks/goals. For Spring 2016, we will evaluate the writing of our majors and minors by the below rubrics. We will ask you to copy the final papers of the majors and minors in your classes. You can use your faculty center to identify these students. Sabine and I will then assess these essays using the rubrics.

• Rubric for short writing assignments, e.g., short essays, reading responses, discussion questions, etc.
• Rubric for long writing assignments, e.g., research papers, longer essays, independent projects, etc.

You may also wish to use the rubrics in your classes; I upload them to Blackboard and grade assignments by clicking through the various categories for each submission. It has made grading much quicker.

Other Rubrics

We will, eventually, develop rubrics for whatever other learning goals we settle upon. Any feedback would be very much welcome, but completely voluntary. Other sample rubrics:

• Sample 1
• Sample 2
• Sample 3
• Sample 4
• Sample 5