Course Selection Process for General Education Assessment
- General education assessment occurs on a five-year cycle. The schedule is published on the University’s website.
- The co-chairs of the GEAC (General Education Assessment Committee) select courses from the areas to be assessed in a given year from the fall schedule when it is published in the preceding spring semester. Courses are selected based on their codes and on the need to rotate as many courses into the process as possible, and attempts are made to select different faculty every year as feasible. Departments/instructors can plan ahead by knowing when each area is scheduled for assessment and anticipating that their courses are subject to being selected at that time.
- Assistant (School of Arts and Sciences and Education Health and Human Services) and Associate (School of Business and Management) Deans are consulted about the courses selected and they send out letters and guidelines to all faculty who will collect data and their department chairs to inform them about the process. These letters are sent before the end of faculty obligation, in May. This allows faculty the summer months to plan and prepare.
- Once courses are selected, if instructors have a reason to request a change, they should work with their chair to find another course from the department that can substitute. Dropping courses from the sample with no substitutes diminishes the stated goals and integrity of general education assessment.
- Faculty work in teams to review SLOs, evaluation criteria, and collected data.
General Guidance for GEP Assessment
Instructors of general education courses can be prepared to collect data at any time by designing appropriate assessment measures (i.e., assignments that are well-aligned with the SLOs) and administering them each time they teach these courses. Data collection happens every fall and reporting happens every spring.