In the mid-1990s, Mercer University's undergraduate schools placed incoming freshmen in their first mathematics course, using only their scores on the mathematics portion of the SAT (SATM). This placement policy was strongly supported by the admissions office because it did not require additional testing of the freshmen in their on-campus summer…

Assessing student attainment in the major field of study is increasingly important to employers and accrediting bodies alike. Construction and manufacturing firms do not like engineers who design faulty bridges and airplanes. Marketing firms want to hire students who understand the difference between a niche market and a global market. School…

Electronic portfolios (eportfolios) represent an assessment measure with strong potential to provide feedback about student performance to improve curricula and pedagogy, to determine individual students' mastery of learning and support feedback for improvement, and to actively involve students in the assessment process. This study examined the…

Environmental scanning, enrollment forecasting, budget analyses, and institutional effectiveness assessment are examples of the explicit contributions institutional research offices make to campus strategic planning.

This report emphasizes the importance of two types of assessment: (1) authentic assessment, which encompasses a holistic or comprehensive view of student performance, and (2) assessment of institutional effectiveness, or outcomes assessment, which is a process of measuring how effectively a college executes its stated mission. While Hudson County…

Increasingly, community colleges and universities are called upon to provide comparable information on their students despite differences in institutional mission and student attendance patterns. To help colleges and universities respond to this need, the Joint Commission on Accountability Reporting was formed to develop uniform reporting formats.…

The use of of the Automatic Interaction Detector (program AID3 of the OSIRIS statistical package) to study a university program is discussed. The performance of students who took general physics lecture and laboratory concurrently is compared to the performance of those who took them separately. Five years of data are analyzed, covering 1,997…

Section 14 of Act No. 307, Public Acts of 1969 of the State of Michigan directed the Department of Education to plan and develop a state program to assess educational progress. The purposes and procedures to be followed in this program during the 1969-70 school year, are outlined in this report. The program will consist of two complementary…

Tinto's retention model provided the theoretical framework for the design of a comprehensive student-retention study at an urban, public 4-year college. The study employed quantitative and qualitative methods to obtain a broad understanding of the many salient factors that contribute to student persistence over a 4-year period. Institutional data…

A study using two types of analyses to examine the validity of student ratings of faculty is described. The first analysis examined faculty ratings in terms of how high-achieving sections of courses rate their instructors in contrast with how low-achieving sections rate their instructors to determine if those teachers who advance their students…

Community colleges need to adopt a broad conceptual definition of a continuing student in the design and evaluation of their retention strategies, recognizing nondegree goals as legitimate educational achievements and intermittent but persistent attendance as a valid method of pursuing educational goals. (MSE)

This paper describes the process by which Dallas County Community College District (Texas) developed and operationalized a student typology for assessing student outcomes. The purpose of the typology is to assist in identifying at risk students and increasing their chances of academic success while simultaneously allowing for the diversity of…

In an effort to determine the methods used to assess and document student achievement at two-year colleges within the Mid-Plains Technical Community College Area (MPTCCA) in Nebraska and to develop an effective assessment model for use within the MPTCCA, surveys were sent to 79 chief executive officers representing all public, two-year, technical…