a. Program Name -Bachelor’s of Science degree in Business
b. Report prepared by – Asghar Sabbaghi
c. Who is the current assessment contact for your program? Asghar Sabbaghi
d. Should assessment information be sent to anyone else in your department? Dean Rob Ducoffe, and the
Chair of the SBE Planning & Assessment Committee (currently Reza Espahbodi)

1. What are the program’s educational goals? (Please take goals directly from your program’s assessment plan, and highlight any changes made this year.)
Students, who complete the undergraduate business program at IUSB, will demonstrate knowledge and skills in their area of concentration, and in:

1. written and oral communication
2. leadership and multicultural diversity
3. analytic reasoning, statistical analysis and management science, and reflective thinking to support organizational decision making
4. using information technologies and understanding their impacts on organizations, economies, and management
5. ethical reasoning, and social and legal responsibilities in organizations and society
6. financial theories, analysis and accounting, and understanding domestic and global economic environments of organizations
7. creating value through integrated production, marketing, and distribution of goods, services, and information
8. team and individual dynamics in organizations.

2. What assessment techniques did the program use? (Please take assessment techniques directly from your
program’s assessment plan and highlight any changes made this year.)
Comprehensive Post-Test as a direct measure:
Since the Spring of 1998, the School has used the ETS Business Field Test each semester as a comprehensive post-test every semester. This test has become part of students’ graduation requirements. The School continues to use the post-test to maintain consistency in the assessment of the undergraduate program.

Exit Interview Sessions as an indirect measure:

Small group discussions with new graduates of the undergraduate business program are conducted. At graduation we arrange several 2-hour sessions in South Bend scheduled on different days and times during the final exam and commencement weeks to assure the maximum number of participants. The sessions are conducted by a facilitator from outside the School.

Concept Inventory

The concept inventory seeks to assess the links between business and economics core courses and the pre-business core as well as some of the general education courses. Specifically, faculty members who teach business core courses report on their coverage of major concepts and program
learning goals as well as evaluating their students’ mastery of the concepts and skills studied in prerequisite courses such as written and oral communication, mathematics, accounting, business law, computing, economics, and statistics.

1 This year, the School’s Planning and Assessment Committee found inconsistencies among various business core courses and their instructors with respect to the level of mastery or knowledge gained by students in prerequisite courses. For example, while there was consistency in assessment of
students’ knowledge in accounting concepts/financial statements and written communication -all of which are considered inadequate; there was no consistency in their assessment of students’ mathematics, statistics, economics, and statistical knowledge and skills. The Committee is currently
working on this issue to resolve this inconsistency before discussing other possible steps.

Capstone Course as a direct measure:

All students are required to take a capstone course, J401, Administrative Policy, during their last year of course work. The course requires students to demonstrate knowledge of ideas and concepts learned from business core courses. The instructors who teach this course report to the Assessment Committee about student attainment of the program’s educational goals.

Employers Survey as an indirect measure:

The Assessment Committee conducts focus groups / surveys with employers every 3-5 years. These help us assess characteristics that employers seek when hiring and the extent to which our graduates meet those requirements. These assessments suggest curricular issues for us to address, and permit us to collect feedback on our graduates, establish/develop relationships with area employers, cultivate internships and placements for our students, and provide opportunities to promote our programs. The Planning and Assessment Committee has spent significant time this year in developing a comprehensive survey for collecting feedback from the employers of our graduates. We have found a list of employers and we are currently conducting this survey.

3. What has your program done with assessment information this year? (i.e. communicated results to faculty, staff, alumni and students, made changes in the curriculum, made changes in the budget, added new courses. . .)
Students have consistently demonstrated strong performance on the ETS field tests and we have been encouraged to communicate them to our various constituencies. We also received strong 2006 data from our alumni survey regarding their educational experiences and the strengths of our business programs. We shared the assessment data with the SBE task forces of (1) Relevance of teaching, business applications and experiential learning, and (2) general skills and knowledge in our business curriculum, for their use in forming proposals to enhance the relevance of SBE courses and the general skills of our students. These task forces made a number of proposals to the faculty. One of the proposals resulted in cultivation of funding from CTS Corporation and establishment of the CTS Center for Experiential Education (CTS-CEE) in 2007. Funded by a grant from the CTS Corporation, the CTS-CEE provides realistic learning situations in which students can apply the concepts and skills developed in classroom settings.

4. After reflecting on assessment activities in your unit, as a result of assessment what are two issues you would like to address?
We continue to focus on strengthening students’ general skills and curricular relevance. In order to address the concerns regarding the career services available to our students, we are paying close attention to enhancing the experiential learning and internship opportunities in our business curriculum. We are planning to create better incentives and opportunities for faculty to incorporate real-world applications and relevant technologies into their classes, and develop skills in using multiple pedagogies. Moreover, we intend to improve the strength and number of direct links with community organizations and classroom/student experiences, such as internships, projects, etc.

The School has made a number of curricular changes in our undergraduate business curriculum as the result of direct or indirect area assessment of each concentration. For example, the faculty in accounting has added a course, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), to the list of required courses
so that accounting students can learn about ERP and an integrated company-wide system approach as well as about the ERP application software (SAP) in the accounting area.

The Management faculty reviewed the requirements in the Entrepreneurship concentration to make it more practically valuable to students. “An understanding of markets and of marketing is essential for any entrepreneur to be successful”. In their view, a shortcoming of entrepreneurship students is their inability to systematically determine whether there is a market need for their business ideas— and then determine how to effectively meet that need. A stronger emphasis on marketing courses within the entrepreneurship concentration should help remedy this problem. Therefore, in order to make the small business and entrepreneurship concentration more valuable to students the faculty agreed to drop two of the existing concentration requirements (W430 and J404), and—in their place—add two marketing courses. Finally, marketing faculty increased the number of required credit hours of marketing courses from 15 to 18 for both Marketing and Advertising concentrations to be consistent with other business concentrations.

In order to address the faculty’s concerns on student’s concepts in math and writing skills, we are scheduled to discuss the matter with our colleagues in the mathematics and English departments. We plan to reinforce the coordination and uniformity of coverage in multiple sections of core math
(M118 and M119) and English (W131 and W230) courses. A few years ago, the issues were discussed between the School of Business and Economics, the chair of the mathematics department and a faculty member, regarding close coordination among instructors teaching the multiple
sections of math courses. In addition, we increased the passing grade for students from “D-” to “C”. This requires any student who receives less than a “C” grade in M118 or M119 to retake the course. They must receive a “C” or higher grade. Following this, an improvement in student’s math skills
has been noticed. A further re-evaluation of math and English course expectations is planned.