This page reviews assessment at Syracuse University, the background and charge of the committee, and model of assessment employed by the committee. The committee structure, membership, and activities can also be viewed from here.

Universities are about hope. If you listen to the stories of students, parents, staff, and faculty, many are stories of hard work and sacrifice in order for them to be at Syracuse University. If you listen to what we celebrate at graduations and convocations, we celebrate the success of our students and their hopes for the future.

Assessment at Syracuse University is also about hope. It is not about quantitative measurements. It is an ongoing reflection by the university community on the following questions:

• What are our hopes for our students?
• What are we doing to realize these hopes?
• How will we know our hopes for our students are being realized?
• How have we changed what we do based on observing our students?

Assessing students is not new at Syracuse University – it is ongoing in various programs in many forms. Faculty routinely assess students in their classes. Many academic programs are assessed for accreditation by their professions. What is new at Syracuse University is the intention to be holistic about our understanding and observations of our students and how they are changed and equipped while they are with us. Put another way, we want to know with some assurance that our students are learning lessons of lasting value. These lessons of lasting value are learned in many places, not just inside classrooms. Recognizing this, assessment at SU considers what happens to students outside the classroom as well.

The goal of the All-University Student Learning Outcomes Assessment Committee (AUSLOAC) is for the SU community to think systematically about our hopes for our students. This is not to say that everyone uses the same system of thinking. No single way of thinking adequately captures the goals and aspirations for every endeavor. However, it is reasonable to reflect on the four questions within the various systems of thought used by various disciplines and other aspects of student life. Towards this end we are engaging the various constituencies of the university community to learn what lessons of lasting value they want to pass on to our students, how they pass those lessons on, and how they know if the lessons are learned.

As a service to our community, we are making available our findings on the World Wide Web. We do this to show the depth, breadth, and diversity of our hopes and aspirations for our students, as well as to discover commonalties across the disciplines and between the realms of academic affairs and student affairs. Our intent is to support an informed discussion of assessment by faculty, staff, students, administrators, and decision-makers. Our committee hopes that what we do is helpful to you and that you will contribute your voice to the ongoing discussion.

"SU will articulate the goals of each program of study and assess students' progress in attaining those goals. The assessment program will provide a constructive framework to help faculty members improve curriculum and pedagogy." (Middle States self-study, p. 107)

Chancellor Shaw defined assessment at the University as "a process including:

• Defining SU student learning goals and expected student achievement
• Describing actions intended to accomplish those goals and expectations
• Evaluating success in accomplishing those goals and expectations
• Developing and implementing activities toward improvement suggested by the evaluation of goals and expectations"

The initial charge to the All University Student Learning Outcome Assessment Committee (AUSLOAC) was to design and implement a process that:

1. appropriately engages the fundamental constituencies of the Syracuse University community (faculty, students, and staff) in a campus discussion of student-learning outcomes assessment;
2. facilitates a campus discussion of learning outcomes for all Syracuse undergraduate students, leading to a report to the Syracuse University Senate through the Senate Committee on Instruction;
3. facilitates a campus discussion within academic units of the student- learning outcomes deemed most appropriate for their individual courses, majors and minors, and, at a later date, the general education requirements of schools and colleges, resulting in a report to their deans and, through the Senate Committee on Instruction, to the Senate; and
4. facilitates a campus discussion of those learning outcomes deemed most important for professional and personal development of the undergraduate student, both within and outside of the classroom, culminating in a report, through the Senate Committee on Instruction, to the Senate.

Model of Assessment

Ultimately, AUSLOAC is responsible for facilitating the development of a formative, faculty-led assessment process involving the interaction of the following elements:

1. State the student learning outcomes
2. Devise and implement ways to achieve the outcomes
3. Evaluate the degree to which the outcomes have been achieved
4. Make improvements to the educational process based on the outcomes and evaluations

 

AUSLOAC Structure

The committee also contains the following three subcommittees:

• Community Conversations:
• Ongoing Efforts
• Learning Outside the Classroom