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Introduction
The General Studies Degree has some unique characteristics that make
assessment difficult. First, our mission is to assist each student to
design and implement a coherent, focused and comprehensive plan of study
leading to an associate's and/or bachelor's degree which achieves the
traditional objectives of a university education and meets the student's
personal and professional goals. While each student's degree must meet
some common requirements, each degree is a unique combination of courses
designed for the student by the student in conjunction with an advisor.
The only course common to every B.S. degree in General Studies is F 401
Senior Capstone and there are a few exceptions even in this course. Second,
general studies teaches only two one credit courses. All of the other
hours (118 or more) are taken in other departments, many in LAS. In addition,
students can earn credit by taking CLEP or DANTES exams or with a prior
learning portfolio. Third, in our program the Director is the only full-time
faculty member. The members of the General Studies Faculty Advisory Committee
are considered adjunct faculty members in the School of Continuing Studies,
but they are not paid. As a result, they cannot be expected to have the
same involvement in general studies that full-time faculty have in their
programs. They do an excellent job of advising the Director on many matters
including assessment.
Objectives and Curriculum
According to the AGuide to IU South Bend Assessment Committee Third Year Review@
the Educational Objectives of IU South Bend are:
1. discipline specific knowledge and skills
2. basic academic success skills
3. academic values
4. higher order thinking skills
5. personal development and career preparation.
The General Studies program uses its curriculum requirements to ensure
that its graduates meet the first four objectives and uses intensive advising
to help each student design a unique combination of courses to meet his
or her personal and career needs. Students must meet five basic requirements:
writing (two courses), mathematics, speech, world culture and computer.
In all areas they must receive a C or better to meet the requirement.
We believe these requirements ensure that students meet basic academic
skills and ,depending on the courses chosen, may help the student meet
some of the other objectives. Each general studies student must take a
minimum of 12 hours in each of three liberal arts and sciences areas:
arts and humanities, science and mathematics, and social and behavioral
sciences. All of our students must choose a concentration and complete
an additional 18 credits in one of three areas mentioned above. When these
18 hours are added to the 12 required for each of the three areas, each
student must take a minimum of 30 hours in his/her concentration. This
ensures the student is learning discipline specific knowledge and skills.
We also strongly encourage our students to obtain minors. These add additional
discipline specific knowledge and skills. All students are also required
to have 15 hours of liberal arts and sciences electives for a total 69
liberal arts and sciences hours. We believe this ensures that students
are exposed to academic values. Finally, all general studies students
must take at least 30 hours of 300 and 400 courses. This ensures that
they are learning higher order thinking skills.
Assessment Plan
Our assessment plan consists of three parts. First, we monitor our students'
success in their courses. Individual students must have an average of
2.0 or better to be in good standing and to graduate. We receive a report
for each semester from the School of Continuing Studies in Bloomington
which gives us the average grade point average for all courses taken by
our students during that semester. We have included the last three reports
which cover the spring and fall semesters of 2002-2003 and the fall semester
of 2003-2004. The average GPA for all students ranges from 3.13 to 3.23
which we believe is good evidence our students are doing well. We also
prepare a report on our Associate Degree graduates and our Bachelor Degree
graduates. These reports calculate the average School GPA and the average
Indiana University GPA as well as the number of minors, DANTES tests,
portfolios and some other statistics. We have included copies of these
reports for the last several years. In each of the time periods, our BGS
graduates have had an average Indiana University GPA very close to 3.0.
Our lowest average was 2.92, and our School of Continuing Studies GPAS
were much higher (some students were able to use our forgiveness policies).
Our BGS graduates used several different ways to earn credit and at least
50% had some foreign language credits. Our Faculty Advisory Committee
reviews each of these reports and, at least in my tenure as Director,
has been favorably impressed with the quality of our students' work. Since
virtually all of the students' work is in courses taught by other departments,
we believe grades are good outcome measures of our students' successes.
The second part of our assessment plan is our capstone course F 401.
This course is required for almost all students. Professor Theodore Hengesbach
developed this course and the workbook of readings. Graduating seniors
take the course. They write four short (2 to 5 pages double spaced) papers
and then organize the papers into a final capstone paper. In the first
short paper, the students write about their Aacademic journey@, how they
got to their graduation in general studies. For many students this is
a long circuitous path. In the second paper, students describe how their
degree, the courses and professors, met the their personal goals. In the
third paper, students show how their degree meets university goals as
described in the readingsBThomas Ehrlich, John Henry Newman, Nancy Vickers,
etc. As in the previous papers, we encourage the student to identify specific
courses and professors that have helped them improve their degrees. The
final paper is about future plans and we ask the student to explain how
his or her degree will assist with graduate school, and/or occupations.
While the quality of the papers differ, most really do discuss how university
goals and personal goals were met and many of the goals are similar to
the five identified by IU South Bend. These papers are tangible evidence of each
student's assessment of his/her general studies degree.
Our Faculty Advisory Committee is involved in the capstone course in two
ways. First, they are aware that this is an important assessment tool
for our program and they continue to support this requirement. Second,
they review many of the papers as a second outside control on quality.
The volume of papers and the very quick turnaround time is such that it
is nearly impossible to have all the papers read by a faculty member in
a semester. However, in both the fall and spring semesters more than half
of the papers are read by one of our faculty members in addition to the
grading by the director. If a faculty member rejects a paper, then the
paper is rewritten to address the objections raised by the faculty member.
This happens regardless of the grade given by the director. We have more
than 100 papers on file from the past several semester and the Assessment
Committee is welcome to read some or all of them. Since this is a daunting
task, I have included most to the comments made by our Faculty Advisory
Committee members over the past several semesters. Since our faculty are
not involved in the production of these papers, we believe their evaluations
are a good measure of the quality of the students' assessments of their
degrees.
The final part of our assessment plan is our alumni survey. The survey
was designed by the director with considerable help from the Faculty Advisory
Committee and Karen Christopher. The Committee approved the survey instrument
and the letter that accompanied the survey. We used Indiana University
Alumni Association mailing addresses and we sent out approximately 1800
questionnaires. We have more than 2000 alumni, but over time some addresses
become useless. After two months, we had received 176 returns and these
have been analyzed. A few additional questionnaires have come in after
our analysis. We have included the comments from these questionnaires,
but we have not included them in the statistical analysis. Copies of the
survey instrument and the data analysis are attached.
The first 12 questions are designed to assess the respondent's satisfaction
with various aspects of the general studies program. For each question
the respondent answers one of the five options:
Strongly Agree 1
Agree 2
Neutral 3
Disagree 4
Strongly Disagree 5.
The first five questions ask the student about his/her satisfaction with
one of our basic requirements. The average responses are as follows:
Computer Literacy 2.53
Mathematics 2.25
Speech 2.23
World Culture 2.19
Writing(2 courses) 2.04
While all of the scores are goodBbetween Agree and NeutralBone, the writing
requirement, is clearly better than the rest, and another, computer literacy,
worse than the others. We asked a second set of questions regarding our
five basic requirements because students could be less satisfied for two
reasons. The students might be less satisfied because we required too
much or because we required too little. Computer literacy is a good example.
It has the highest dissatisfaction rate and the lowest score (1.62) on
the: too little = 1, about right =2 and too much =3 question. It appears
that the lack of satisfaction with our computer literacy requirement probably
means we haven't required enough. This interpretation makes sense when
one understands our computer requirement is fairly recent and many of
the respondents had no computer requirement when they were in general
studies. As computers have become more and more important requiring at
least one course (what we currently require) seems very sensible.
Mathematics, speech and world culture have similar scores on the satisfaction
questions (2.25, 2.23, 2.19) and similar scores on the too little too
much questions (1.92, 1.85, 1.89). We expected the mathematics requirement
to rate lower on satisfaction and more toward the too much side because
anecodotal evidence from our students suggested many were unhappy with
our mathematics requirement. They did not like mathematics and didn't
believe it should be required. We were surprised to find that the scores
in speech and world culture were similar to those in mathematics. We get
very few complaints about these requirements.
The sixth question concerns the satisfaction with the General Studies
Advisors. The average score on this question was 1.67 which was the third
lowest (most satisfied) of the 12 questions, and was very close to the
score of 1.63 for the general studies program. If you advise enough students
there will always be a few who are unhappy about something and that is
the case here. Of the 176 responses six were 4's and six were 5's. This
was a small number, less than ten percent, but enough to raise the average
score. Since each student has a unique program, we spend a considerable
amount of time advising students, so this is a very important question.
I know that Ted Hengesbach and Judy Graf, like Karen and I, worked very
hard to help our general studies students make good decisions. This excellent
average score is a tribute to their hard work.
The seventh question concerns our general studies forgiveness policies.
This question received only 117 responses. This was by far the lowest
number of responses to any of the 12 questions. By comparison, the next
lowest number of responses was143 on correspondence courses and the median
number of responses was 159. The low level of responses was due to the
fact that many of our students never bothered to check out our forgiveness
policies. Our policies are very generous, but many students don't need
to use them. These policies are discussed at length in our F 203 Introduction
to General Studies course, but only about half of our students take this
course. The average score was 2.09 which is reasonably good.
One of the major advantages of the general studies program to students
is the flexibility students have with their individual program. Thus it
is not surprising that students are most satisfied with the program's
flexibility. The average score of 1.46 was the best of the 12 questions.
General studies students can earn college credit by taking CLEP exams
and DANTES exams. Since we give the DANTES examsBBethel College gives
the CLEP examsBour students tend to take the DANTES exams if they want
college credit. In a typical year, we will administer 40 to 60 DANTES
exams and more than half of the exams will be passed successfully. While
most of our students don't take any exams for credit, some of our students
take several and a few take five or six. The satisfaction level is 1.80
which is in the middle of the 12 questions. Only 144 responses were received
on this question indicating that some of our alumni were unfamiliar with
these tests. We discuss the advantages of these tests in our F 203 class,
but only about half of our students take the class. The average score
of 1.80 is quite good, so those who are aware of the tests appear pleased.
The average score on the portfolio question was 1.79 which was almost
identical to the DANTES question. A few more students 148 responded to
this question, but clearly some students were not familiar with portfolio
possibilities. We discuss portfolio possibilities in F 203 but only a
few students are in a position to receive portfolio credit. As in the
previous question, those students who are aware of the portfolio credit
seem reasonably satisfied with our procedures.
While we don't give correspondence courses, the School of Continuing
Studies has a large selection and some of our students take correspondence
courses for credit. The average level of satisfaction was 1.90 which is
slightly less than that for DANTES tests and portfolios. Also some students
were unaware of correspondence course possibilities, so the number of
responses was 143 which was almost identical to the 144 for DANTES tests.
The final question concerns the satisfaction with the general studies
program. This is probably the most important question and it has the second
best score of 1.63. This suggests that most of our graduates are pleased
with the program and only a small percentageBeight 4's or 5's out of 168
responses or less than .5 percentBwere dissatisfied.
We believe that one good measure of the program's success is the percentage
of our students that enter graduate school and earn graduate degrees.
Former Director Theodore Hengesbach estimated that approximately 25 percent
of our graduates went on to graduate school. The responses to our question
regarding the respondents educational and occupational activities indicate
that 30 of our alumni or 17 percent have earned graduate degrees and another
nine alumni are currently enrolled in graduate programs. These numbers
reinforce Dr. Hengesbach's estimate of 25 percent. We believe this is
a good outcome measure of our program's success.
We have included copies of the respondents' comments, including a few
who were not included in the statistical analysis. The overwhelming majority
of comments about the general studies program are positive. There are
a couple of negative comments about advising and a number of negative
comments about difficulty getting jobs. Since general studies graduates
work as doctors, dentists, lawyers, social workers, teachers, managers,
sales representative, etc., we believe the program can provide graduating
seniors with good opportunities for employment. It is true, however, that
it is a general program, so it will not provide specific training in a
specific occupation.
We believe the information from our survey of graduates indicates that
they are pleased with the various aspects of the general studies program
including requirements, advising, alternative ways of earning credit and
our forgiveness policies..
Summary
As we mentioned earlier, the general studies program is complex to assess
because our students have unique programs, they take only two credit hours
in general studies, and we have no full time faculty except the Director.
We believe our use of grades, capstone papers and the alumni survey provides
us with sufficient evidence to assess the program. Further, we believe
the evidence submitted above documents the success of our students and
the general studies program in meeting the educational objectives of IU South Bend.
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