It's Difficult to Assess Student Writing

For the past year I've participated on my university's assessment committee. Although most universities struggle with assessment I think my university has some unique challenges. My university is currently upper division, possibly the only university left that begins at the junior level (although we're just beginning a year long campus debate over the merits of becoming a 4-year institution). The university's regional accrediting organization recently told us that we are still responsible for undergraduate student learning outcomes such as writing, critical thinking, etc.

Beginning with the assessment committee took a commonly used rubric from AAC&U and first decided to use the rubric to assess a small sample of student papers from different disciplines such as education, english, psychology, and business. As a business professor I found the task intriguing but difficult. I am not a writing professor and found it impossible to distinguish between criteria such as understanding audience vs. context vs. purpose vs. task vs. focus. It was a bit easier to assess content development and content syntax/usage/mechanics.  It was interesting and challenging to assess quality and quantity of sources used for a personal reflection paper such as a student's philosophy of teaching statement.


Assessment is an uncomfortable and humbling process. When working with my peers from my own college and also from other disciplines including english (literature and composition), nursing, psychology, chemistry, and business, we all expressed the same concerns about rating the papers totally different from the others. The papers were anonymous, but it was easy to figure out a paper was from an english course when it connected everything to Wuthering Heights. I was a bit nervous that my ratings would reveal that I am either a pushover, too tough, or, more worrisome, an incompetent instructor?


One of the papers was a competitive analysis of a specific industry, and I rated it as fairly well written across all criteria, addressing each of Porter's competitive forces.  As least one rater assessed it as totally unacceptable on most criteria. I am most comfortable in providing students with feedback on executive summaries, memos, white papers, case analyses, project proposals, RFPs, requirements documentation, or pure academic research papers. 



To be continued...

Usernames Continued: Universities and FERPA

In my previous post I discussed usernames and their role in the authentication process. Systems in a university setting has similarities with any organization but have different regulatory requirements. Before Federated Identity Management (FIM) or Single-Sign-On (SSO), many universities also used to use SSN or a student ID or as a username to access some systems on campus. Using an ID# or personal pin# was probably not a good idea since the SSN or student ID may have also been used to authenticate students in a way similar to a password is used in other instances by some university departments to access student records.

In addition the Family Education Records Privacy Act (FERPA) helped push universities away from using confidential information such as SSN as a student ID or username. FERPA is the federal law protects certain pieces of student records from being made public without student consent. For example, faculty are no longer allowed to post a list of student grades attached to their SSN as was common in the past. But student email accounts are not protected by FERPA as they are considered "directory information". For campuses with FIM or SSO systems the email would likely be the same as the username and therefore also be made public. Students do have the option to make any of their "directory information" confidential if they choose.

The PhD- Is it a waste of time?

The Economist published an interesting article looking at the value of a PhD in The disposable academic
Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time. Although a few faculty tend to complain about their jobs quite a bit I think the value of a PhD may vary between academic fields. The value may be more intrinsic rather than financial. When I entered my PhD program in management at Southern Illinois University someone at the orientation session for all new doctoral students made a statement that you are entering a profession that will lead to one of the best jobs/careers available other than that of a federal court judge. There is a substantial sacrifice involved in successfully completing the program which can take its toll on one's health and relationships. The end result is well worth it.