Assessing Our Curriculum

Each semester stellar evaluations tell us that our students love our faculty, their accessibility, their concern for students’ well-being and growth, their enthusiasm for literature, their dedication to scholarship and creative writing.

But in this age of accountability, accrediting agencies, university administrators, and state legislators will no longer accept students’ praise as sufficient evidence that learning has occurred. These “stake-holders,” to use the jargon of assessment, want to know students’ views of professors, but they also want to know what professors claim that students will “know and be able to do” at the point of graduation. These observers also want to know how departments will determine the effectiveness of their degree programs in reaching these objectives.

To meet this outside demand for accountability and—more important—to ensure that we continue to meet our students’ needs, our department has implemented an assessment plan for our BA program. The plan asks that graduating seniors—beginning with the fall semester of 2005—submit a portfolio of their written work in first-year composition, in sophomore-level literature surveys, in junior-level writing courses, and in two senior-level literature courses. In addition to these selections from courses in the major, the portfolio will include one new piece of writing, a “reflective essay,” which gives graduates a chance to comment on their growth as writers and as students of literature.

In addition to submitting these exit portfolios, graduating seniors—in groups of three or four—will also attend an exit interview, where they will discuss their perceptions of their degree program with several faculty members. At the end of this 45-minute conversation, each graduate will fill out a 30-question survey on their experience in the BA program.

Over time, the portfolios, interviews, and surveys will allow faculty to document the strengths of the degree program and to discover areas where we may strengthen our curriculum.

We have also begun assessing our curriculum by comparing it to BA and MA programs offered by Auburn University and other peer institutions across the country. Over the year, subcommittees focused on particular curricular areas—English literature, American literature, world literature, creative writing, rhetoric—will gather information, report their findings to the faculty, and lead discussion on ways to bolster our curriculum.

To provide a theoretical framework for our discussion, faculty have also been reading and critiquing articles and books such as Robert Scholes’ The Rise and Fall of English and Alvin Kernan’s In Plato’s Cave, all focused on renewing the field of “English studies.” Combined with our assessment plan and our discussion of programs offered by peer departments of English, this ‘conversation’ with the theorists should help us to maintain the strengths of our curriculum and to find other ways to serve our students’ needs.

Rich Raymond, Department Head