Overview

Welcome to the documentation supporting the Assessment Compliance Report at USF!

The Report is designed to provide Deans and other institutional leaders with one-stop information on the level to which academic programs (Majors and Certificates)* provide required annual assessment reporting and planning following commonly accepted good practice in higher education and aligned with the expectations of USF’s current institutional accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Universities Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC). Compliance with the requirements of these external stakeholders is assigned via a series of rubrics detailing the USF Assessment Standards (USF Academic Assessment Handbook, page 8), designed by the Office of Decision Support - Institutional Effectiveness (ODS-IE).

Each program submits an annual Assessment Report and Assessment Plan. Once Plans/Reports are submitted, ODS-IE assigns a rating and provides specific feedback based on the rating. ODS-IE then works with the program to complete edits as needed based on rating; not all programs achieve the highest rating. Programs that struggle to achieve the highest rating might benefit from additional faculty development resources in the area of assessment.

*At a minimum, academic programs included in the assessment reporting and planning requirements are all unique Majors and Certificates (see Definitions below). Some program faculty choose to complete additional assessment Reports and Plans for Concentrations, however this is generally discouraged. These are listed on USF’s Institutional Summary Form provided to SACSCOC upon reaffirmation.

1. Approved (2022 and beyond), Compliant (2017-2021), Developed and Highly Developed (2016-2017): All elements of the Plan/Report meet the USF Assessment Standards

2. Reviewed with Comments (Minor Revisions) (2022 and beyond), Non-Compliant 1 (2017-2021), and Emerging (2016-2017): Minor revisions would be required to bring the document into compliance. These often include but are not limited to: including the total number of students assessed, ensuring that some form of inter-rater agreement data is collected or planned to be collected for assessment methods with a subjective scale (such as a scoring rubric for a project), and not including specific action items resulting from the use of the assessment results.

3. Reviewed with Comments (Majors Revisions) (2022 and beyond), Non-Complaint 2 (2017-2021), and Initial (2016-2017): Components are missing from the document or are entirely outside the scope of commonly accepted good practice. Examples of major revisions needed are the use of the phrase “we will continue to monitor this outcome” in the “Use of Assessment Results” section of an Assessment Report or the exclusive use of course grades or course passing as the “Methods of Assessment” section of an Assessment Plan.

4. On Hold/NA: There are no students available, or, there is another reason that has provided an approved delay in submission.

Programs in the College of Engineering and most of the programs in the College of Behavioral & Community Sciences complete these reports based on calendar years (January 1st - December 31st), while all others (e.g., College of Arts and Sciences, Taneja College of Pharmacy) complete them based on academic years, with preceding summer terms included. The alignment of colleges with years included in assessment plans/reports can be found in the table:

Report Pages

Welcome Page: This page briefly describes the content of the Dashboard. There are no filters enabled on this page.

AY22-23 Status: College Level Summary is a snapshot of the number and percentage of programs' 2022 Reports and 2023 Plans with each rating. The page can be filtered by College and Program Category (Bachelor, Master, Doctoral, Graduate Certificate, Undergraduate Certificate, Specialist) to provide additional detail. Hovering over the “slice” of the pie charts will display the number of programs with a particular rating within that filtered group. The total number of Majors listed will be the same for the 2022 Assessment Reports and 2023 Assessment Plans, and any programs that have been or were in the process of termination, the process of being established, or had no enrolled students during that period will be indicated with the “On Hold” designation. To see the specific programs rated as “Non-Compliant 1,” “Non-Compliant 2,” “Major Revisions,” “Minor Revisions,” “Missing,” and “On Hold,” see the List of Non Compliant Programs page.

Longitudinal Status: College Summary includes a timeline view of the distribution of ratings for Reports from 2018 - 2022. This page contains an overview of assessment compliance from the 2017-2018 academic year (for academic year colleges)/calendar year 2018 (for calendar year colleges) to the current year. The proportion of Compliance to Non-Compliance over time is a valuable tool to help identify the extent to which faculty have been able to produce assessment materials.

List of Non Compliant Programs includes a list of the programs assigned a non-approved/non-compliant rating. It is important to note that these programs might be struggling with enrollment, so resourcing recruitment might be a valuable addition for allowing USF to continue offering the program to its students.

Glossary: Definitions

Additional Resources