Transcribed from the recording and lightly edited for readability. The speaker's views are his own and do not represent ARC-PA. Confirm specifics against the current ARC-PA Standards and Compliance Manual.
0:00 — How this session works
This is a previous recording that's been clipped a little bit, and I'm going to be switching basically to the recording. But let me kind of give you that. My plan of action here. I'm going to be playing the recording, and I'm going to be stopping the recording at certain points in time, and I'm going to be inserting some additional perspectives about how this might apply to your program or some of the, I guess, overarching concerns that the sixth edition standards might pose to this, to some of these issues that we're going to describe.
But most importantly, the objective of this is to improve your assessment process. And I think some of these conversations will be helpful. So with that being said, I will begin the presentation.
0:52 — Assessment as a form of research
I'm hoping to take you on a journey today to help you to think of it differently than what oftentimes we did. I'll just tell you from my own personal perspective is that, you know, having gone in back in the 90s, assessment for me was very linear and very episodic. It wasn't until I completed my PhD that I started to see that assessment actually is a form of research.
And that's what I'm going to try to impart with you today. So we're going to talk about program structure moving from reactive cycles to continuous evaluation. Also the influence of assessment practices and as well as engagement and alignment. So basically, the session overview is looking at the fact that assessment is part of the core responsibility. So all of you collect large volumes of data. You all conduct reviews.
You all document findings in alignment with standards. However, the challenge is not whether it occurs, but whether it's continuous, okay, integrated, actionable. Okay. And many programs operate with a cycle of intensified review. What I'm going to talk to you about today is how you can fill in the gaps in between. I'm sorry. One of the things I want to say about that particular slide
2:26 — Under the Sixth Edition, assessment is the institution's responsibility
is that ultimately, with the sixth edition standards, assessment is the responsibility of the institution. So as I go through this discussion, there's going to be a lot of workload implications in some of my conversations. Remember that you have to have number one resources to conduct assessment and support to do so. I think we already talked about that.
2:55 — Systems theory: the program as a living, breathing organism
So I'm going to start with a little bit of theory, systems theory, which is something that I did study a little bit myself. I think it fits perfectly with a PA program. First of all, before I get into that. Think of a program as being a living, breathing organism. It's moving forward. All of the component parts: faculty, students, process, procedure. Everything you do is continuously moving forward, but it's also connected.
Basically, it's very complex. So systems theory looks at relationships, patterns, interactions and looks at the system as a whole. And that's what I want to impart to you, is that everything that you do is connected in some fashion. So let's talk about a few constructs interconnectedness. That's the concept that everything, all components are linked together. Every variable in your program, every course you teach. Okay.
The outcome of that has a rippling effect. And I could go on and on about this and I'll give you some examples as we go along. So the term holism basically is that you simply cannot understand, say for example, a program that's that complex without looking at everything, not looking at parts at a time, but rather everything and being open versus closed systems. This means that in an open system is that you're continuously learning, continuously open to new change, and you're not thinking of it as basically an incremental process, but rather a continuous, fluid process.
4:46 — C1.01 and C1.02 through the interconnectedness lens
So I want to pause this here, and I want you to think about the new sixth edition standard format. So C1.01 has the five questions. Okay. And you have the opportunity and the ability to select to some degree what data points that you are going to use to analyze each respective question in C1.01 and C1.02. So if you think of the concept of interconnectedness and the ability to look at basically how the data all flows together in terms of defining whether there's compliance or defining whether there's an area needing improvement, these concepts really do apply because you have to think through the lens, for example, of whether faculty are effective, whether your admissions process is effective, whether academic or the didactic year is effective, and clinical.
And finally, whether your program is effective. And without having the ability to look at the big picture and look at all of the data points together and crystallizing those into your analysis. You're going to have a hard time kind of understanding the opportunity that you have with that system. And finally, feedback loops really allow the program to maintain equilibrium, but also to change. Okay. So programs are always changing hopefully for the better.
And I think that this will kind of give you some insights about what we're talking about.
6:33 — Collect, review, document, and what happens in between
So assessment is happening all the time. So you collect data, you review, and you document. Okay. So these are three big constructs that happen all the time. However, what I'm going to tell you is what happens in between: what happens after the data was collected, or before. What about before the review was conducted? Did anything change? If findings are documented, does that mean anything happens with the documentation?
But rather does it sit in an archive somewhere? So this may seem like like the assessment loop, but it's really not. Okay. So think of assessment as assessment in a cycle. This is not continuous assessment, by the way. End of term reviews. Annual reporting. Episodic engagement is not continuous. Basically, what it is, is chunks. It's events that occur during the course of a program.
7:38 — Getting data reviewed just in time for your committees
So the question is, how do you break that loop and how are you able to achieve continuous self-assessment? One of the challenges is having the data ready to be reviewed just in time. In other words, when you have your committee structure meeting on a regular basis, having that ready to be reviewed on a more frequent basis gives you more not only retrospective, but current day and prospective review, because you want to be able to continuously review your data as things move forward.
Not to miss, as I'll be talking about some of the micro trends that can occur within your program.
8:28 — Continuous assessment is not about more data
So continuous assessment is not about more data. And so what I want you to do is keep an open mind here. Okay. It's not more data. It's how you use the data. And it's the timing in which you're using the data. It's about consistently looking at the data in real time. It's about connecting the dots together. Okay. And that takes a scientific mind to think about.
But think of it that way. In the field of qualitative research, there is what's called phenomenology. And that looks at basically the entire picture to try to find patterns. And to some degree, that's what I'm talking about. So what happens is the reality inside most programs. And again, I've lived this for decades: there's an end- of-cycle. There's preparation and there's committee periods. Okay. And it makes you tired to think about it.
"Right now I've got to do it." Now There's another report. Another preparation. It seems like it never ends. And I think to some degree, it never does end. Okay. But what if you were to look at it differently through a different lens? Now, what if assessment was so continuous that basically when you go to document, it's basically easy because you've already connected the dots already?
So faculty I think are are really the ones that I think are impacted the most. And in my career as a PA educator, I saw it firsthand. I experienced it, and now in my second career as a consultant, I see it all the time. Faculty are impacted very adversely by the way that assessment is done. Compressed reviews, reactive decision making, and inconsistent engagement.
10:28 — Is assessment in your workload calculator?
So the question is why? Now, as we look at workload, I guess one of the questions I would ask any of the attendees is, is assessment currently part of your workload and your workload calculator? Do you get credit for serving on committees related to assessment? Okay. Is your institution supporting assessment, So it's not falling on individuals to constantly keep it going? Okay. Do you have support to making sure the data is collected, tabulated, translated into a format that's easily accessible and able to be interpreted?
So these are questions that are very important because without some of those elements, it's going to be difficult to achieve any degree of continuous self-assessment in your program. Again, trying to make sense of, you know, processes that are defined for you. Like, for example, the ARC-PA process. I'm going to get to that in a little bit, but that tends to result in it being a chore rather than something that you do for purpose of continuous review.
11:50 — The structural gap: admissions, didactic, clinical, committees
So the structural gap that occurs if you think about these constructs: admissions, didactic courses, clinical rotations and then discussions. How are they connected? So as students enter your program through your admissions process, they enter a course or they enter didactic courses. Okay. So what's the impact of the courses on the students? Are they prepared? Do you know they're prepared? And I'm going to use the term when you are teaching individual classes.
Do you know the room? Are you reading the room properly? And do you know that students are learning looking at it through basically multiple- choice exams, and periodically looking at it is not adequate. Okay. Then students enter clinical rotations and oftentimes they are skating beneath the surface. How many of you have experienced double-digit PACKRAT scores? That's because the students never learned deeply during this phase.
Okay. But again, there are ways of tracking that. And I'll get to that in a little bit. And then committee discussions. I think that when we talk about committees, I think every faculty member feels tired. Okay. Because it's another thing to do. It takes time. Okay. So think of committees less as the time spent in it, but more as how highly effective you can be in that committee if you are constantly assessing the data.
And I want to say also is that rather than always retrospectively looking back in time. Think of this as being a prospective experience.
13:37 — What ARC-PA means by continuous, systemic self-assessment
So what's required with continuous assessment? So ARC-PA has defined it as continuous, systemic self-assessment. And they're very clear about it. It's not periodic. It's not reactive. It's not isolated. Okay. So if we take that definition of continuous systemic self-assessment, that means that it's happening all the time in every single facet of your program, and you're looking at every single variable in your program. And it's happening basically in time and space.
Okay. So let's kind of delve into that just a bit deeper.
14:18 — Assessment embedded in daily instruction
So what if assessment becomes embedded? So I'm going to talk about action research a little bit more now in terms of daily instruction. You know I was in the classroom for 30 years. I mean, I've seen the generations of students come and go. I used to be able to hold a classroom pretty well. And then in in later years, it became more difficult. Students do not have the attention span anymore. So as part of daily instruction, you analyze the environment that students are in.
And maybe what you do is you change the way you teach according to the students, the way that they learn. And I'm not saying individuality, but rather it may take a pedagogical shift over time. And that's what I did. Part of faculty observation, you know, observing students performance over time. So again, you're observing them in the classroom. You're observing them in the laboratory. You're looking at their skill development.
rather than just simply memorizing a checklist. Do they understand why they listen to the heart at the areas that they do? Do they understand about why they do the exam the way they do? And do they really understand the questions that you give them? Are those questions second order or not? Right. And then part of program dialogue, I think it's important not to be phobic about assessment, but rather think of assessment as being equally important as teaching.
So think of action research as teaching and assessment being combined together into one concept. And at the bottom I said, you know, if you look at the C1.01 five questions and the C1.02 two questions, going forward in the future, I see the opportunity that you can use that as a framework to continuously assess your program, using that as basically just that, a framework. But it asks questions like, is your admissions effective?
Is your academic year effective? Is clinical effective? And so I think if you look at it that way, Everything is connected and all the data points interact with each other. And I think that that's the way of looking at it.
16:37 — Using the five questions annually, not once a cycle
And you look at C1.02: sufficiency of resources are interrelated, of course, to outcomes. Because if you don't have good resources, you're not going to have good outcomes. And I'll just add that I think the expectation is that programs are using the five questions annually. So if you look at the C1.01 and C1.02 you know, templates, you're gathering data each year and you're continuing to aggregate it until you get into your, you know, validation cycle or wherever you are in the process.
Right? But if you were to to analyze each question each year, and you were to get to the point where you can use this as an intellectual and assessment exercise, you're going to gain insights that are going to give you, let's say, current status of each of those elements. So I see it as a as a tremendous opportunity. So faculty's role in this: not just being a part of a committee, but rather routine observation.
And it takes practice. It takes. It takes intentionality to do this. Documentation. Shared insights. Okay. So rather than just talking about, well, the class bombed that exam, the question would be, why did they bomb the exam? And again, not saying that it's the fault of anybody, because I've given exams that students have bombed. And I've said to myself, what happened there? Okay. It's an opportunity to say maybe the questions weren't quite the way that I taught.
Maybe they were too over the top. Maybe the students didn't understand. You've got to always think about what happened if there's an adverse event that occurs, right? If a student bombs their practical exam. Why is that? Did they not memorize the checklist? You saw them do it in lab all the time. But why? Because they didn't really integrate it.
18:47 — Small practices, large impact: student success signals
So let's talk about some practical institutional considerations. Now I'm going to call this "small practices, large impact." And I'm going to use student success as the construct here because I think it lends itself the best. So as your students enter the program, okay, they almost all of them basically feel like they've been hit by a ton of bricks, right? And many of them, some of them never recover.
They get into the semester. They cannot adjust. They can't. They cannot, you know, handle the academics. Okay. But what if you were to try to look at small bits of information and start patterning that together? Maybe it's just a few quizzes. Maybe it's basically the first exam, and looking at patterns of student behavior. And again, I'm not saying you need to spend like inordinate amount of time.
But as students start to emerge having some issues, then maybe an algorithmic approach to how students can be intervened with in terms of student success measures, study skills, those types of things can be embedded in your process. Okay. And this this persists all the way through the program. Students will fly beneath the surface. If you look at a point-biserial, if you look at basically the level of questions, students that have a hard time understanding integrated questions are the ones that get the 99 on PACKRAT 1, and they're the ones that go on and fail.
They're the ones that go on and get substandard scores. And if those patterns are never picked up along the way, then the students find themselves failing their PANCE. And again, I know you know this to be true, but this takes a continuous viewpoint about how to study the students' pattern of behavior and how you can intervene.
20:48 — Metacognition, micro-trends, and reducing attrition
And I'll just add that the students in our classrooms, to some degree, are not the same students of ten years ago. There's more students that are entering that lack good metacognitive skills. So one of the things I want to say about these elements is that the earlier that you can detect some of these micro trends, you know, students that are struggling early in the first semester, the more likely that you can intervene if you have a really robust student success system and you can use coaching, intervention, whatever kind of methodology you want.
But the students are more likely to respond early than when they get to midterm or beyond, when they're already too late in the process. I mean, this is something that I think all programs are going to be faced with is that how are you going to begin to develop a system to reduce attrition before it occurs?
21:53 — Alignment and cross-committee integration
So alignment across the program is important. I mean, I think we talked about the frameworks and the aligned conversations, but what about cross- committee integration? This is the hardest skill to teach, because the concept of committee oftentimes is one big committee where basically we all talk to each other and never get anything done. Okay, I've been there. Right. If you think of committees basically as integrated, integrated work groups, and the information that flows through those committees must find its way to the right person.
So like any action plan that is ever created based on both retrospective and real time data needs to be communicated to the right individual. There needs to be a tracking mechanism, so it's not lost. And I think that the system that lends itself in years past is that we met as a committee once a semester about these kinds of things. And basically we looked at and said, everything looks okay to me.
And I'm not saying you say that, but that's what I experience. But rather, this has to be part of the process that changes within your program. So again, two things. One, it has to be prospective analysis of data, and it has to be retrospective.
23:19 — The centralized assessment committee model
And one thing I want to add is that whatever committee structure you have, if it works for you, great. One method that I've seen work very well for many programs is that you have a centralized assessment committee that reviews all data. Once it's available to be reviewed. That committee analyzes the data, looks for trends, comparisons, triangulations, if it's available, and then if there's any areas that are of concern, that data then is referred to the most appropriate persons or committees to be further reviewed over time.
So again, the action plans are recorded in every single committee structure. And ultimately it might be twice per year that you're able to to bring all the data together and sit together and use, for example, the five question format to begin analyzing that data. So again, tracking without burden. So: consistent format, centralized insights. So the centralized insight is how the data tracks into your program.
It's all the time. It's not episodic. It's not like once a semester. It's when it becomes available. And so during the course of the year, there are numerous data sets that can be analyzed if they're available. So if you look at it and you action it, then you can action it quickly without waiting to the end. So I believe that you can improve a course in real time.
It doesn't mean that you're going to change something at the moment, but you may improve basically some of the practices in the course without obviously changing the syllabi because the students are struggling. Okay. I liken that to when you have a faculty member struggling and you intervene. And I've gone in and done teaching evaluations and the faculty member is struggling with some mentoring, they can start to start to read the room better, and they can start to understand better why they're not connecting with the student.
And and again, this is longitudinal visibility to make sure that you're always following things forward.
25:39 — Empowering data-driven decisions
So we're talking just briefly about what we believe in is empowering data-driven decisions. And let me just kind of say that it's not just about, you know, triangulation of three points like ARC-PA states. It's about making data-driven decisions based upon real-time data. So these are the things that we can call, you know, further enhancement that you that you look at something. And I would say that you have to kind of like break the mold of thinking about assessment as being an episodic event, but rather think of it as being a constant observational process.
So if you were to have insight aggregated, you could look at that information. If you have centralized program visibility, the data all comes together and you're able to see it crystallize and see it in a new light. And then, of course, longitudinal pattern recognition is about really those small points I talked about that if you follow them and you see them, you don't wait until the end of the next year.
You see that now and then you intervene. And again, I keep using student success as the key thing. But it's true. I've done that for many years, and I've seen the impact of intervening very early and preventing attrition. Here's a question for you. What if you had the ability to submit your data into a portal, and within seven days the data is back and you're able to review it in terms of actionable, say, tabulation or reports.
Okay. What if all data in your program, every single component could be done in that manner, and it would no longer be a burden to any of your faculty? This is what we at Edulytic Solutions are committed to. This is not really a sales webinar, but I'll just say this is that there's an opportunity for you to potentially have that kind of resource that would enhance your assessment process.
27:55 — Insight, not task: the conceptual framework
So if you think about the conceptual framework, that continuous assessment is not meant to be a task. It's basically insights. It's basically what you learn in the classroom, what you learn as you look at the data that you get, what you learn discussing it with your colleagues. Right. And if you were to take all that together and say, we have a better way of looking at the program as it goes forward.
And again, I think that looking at it in hindsight a year back doesn't give you the opportunity to make the changes at the time that maybe it could make a bigger impact, right. So stronger decisions and better outcomes. And I think that getting outside the mold of and again, please understand, I'm not trying to to criticize ARC-PA, but the way that ARC-PA designed the assessment, it kind of held people hostage with this process that you had to do this, this and this, and you couldn't intervene until you had, you know, x number of data points.
So the question to you is, if your program is already collecting the data, what prevents it from being consistently connected and acted upon in real time? Next question: what would change if those insights were structured, visible and aligned across the program? How would that affect the program? How would you see things differently? So if you go back to your programs and you imbue the culture with this, think of the following things: that it's not a task. Okay.
Earlier insight. So any insight that can be garnered early in the process is better because you can act upon it quicker, and your decisions are stronger because it's based on more data points. Remember that everything is connected, and making decisions on singular data points, Yeah, it doesn't make sense sometimes, but because everything is connected, you can start seeing that you're making a decision based upon a lot of information, including qualitative, not just simply the numbers and then improved outcomes.
So my, and this needs to be updated, obviously it's been a while, but my passion leading Edulytic is really the space that I've worked in for many years. And it's really about how assessment insights are captured, connected and surfaced in a way that supports continuous evaluation. It's something I believe in, something that I've worked at for many years, and maybe it's the researcher in me that allowed me to see things through a different lens.
I guess that I see it as an opportunity for action research.
30:49 — Questions to take back to your program
So, questions for you as we start to wrap up. you know, how does your program define continuous assessment? Where does assessment activity tend to concentrate within your academic year? What prevents insights from being shared across courses or committees, and how do faculty contribute to evaluation? And what would earlier visibility of patterns change in your program? Could you improve? Could you prevent? And what do you see as the greatest opportunity to reduce assessment burden while increasing insight?
This is not easy. So folks understand this is not a magic wand. But if the I guess the understanding about research, about the opportunities that lends itself, were to be understood better, faculty would see that it makes a difference in your lives. Okay, it frees you up. It actually sets you free in some ways. Okay, so
31:58 — Barriers, expectations, and research embedded in your program
And I want you to ask yourself two questions. One is, what's preventing you at your program level from achieving what I just described? What impediments, what barriers, resource- wise, process-wise, exist? So again, maybe it's a pie in the sky to some degree, but this is where programs need to be in the future going forward, if not now. And so things are changing in terms of assessment.
And the level of assessment expected in programs is at a very high level. As a matter of fact, higher level than many of our analogous professional colleagues around the country. Okay. Secondly, I can tell you that the opportunity for research within program outcomes is outstanding. I published many of my articles based upon the analysis of program outcomes, and then aggregation of program outcomes and sharing with other programs, as well as being able to I was able to determine and develop, say, a risk profile or risk analysis process.
I was able to basically build mostly my entire research agenda based on, I'd say, embedded research within the program. One aspect of that was measuring stress over and how could we intervene at certain critical points in time. So I welcome you to obviously reach out to me if you have questions about that. But it's an important question to ask yourself. If you look at the following, when the assessment becomes continuous, integrated and aligned, programs, and I mentioned before, they're living, breathing organisms, they move from reactive responses to intentional oversight.
So you're actually interacting with it ongoing, strengthening it. And then eventually the performance, because the program is going to improve. And that allows you to break free of that episodic approach, which many programs have been stuck in for a long time.
34:17 — Live Q&A: metacognitive skills and real-time faculty support
So with that being said, any questions? So I'm going to I'm going to stop share and I'm going to ask the questions we have.
Jacqueline (moderator): So, Scott, is there data to support that today's students have lower metacognitive skills? And what resources would you recommend to a faculty who needs real time help in an ongoing course?
Scott Massey: Yeah, well, good question. You know, metacognition is not easily measured. There are indices that can measure it. But I want you to ask yourself what you have seen over the past number of years. Students, and metacognition is how you think about your own thinking process: How do you learn and what do you see in students when they enter your programs? When they struggle, they're unable to pivot and unable to basically, through trial and error, learn more effectively.
So that's one. The research supports that, by the way, and I apologize. Jacqueline, could you repeat the second half of that question?
Jacqueline (moderator): What resources would you recommend to a faculty who needs real time help in an ongoing course?
Scott Massey: Yeah, I mean, that's a really loaded question. I mean, I guess it depends on what it is you're needing help with. But, I mean, I think faculty development encompasses, you know, the pedagogy of the course itself. How are you delivering the content? How much interaction do the students have? How comfortable are you in the assessment that you are that you are administering to the students, and how are you using feedback to improve the class going forward?
Obviously, things such as ensuring that whatever class you have is covering the content areas that are required, but beyond that, is the delivery of the class really raising the students' critical thinking skills or challenging them to do so? To me, that's kind of the framework of faculty development, which should exist within your university. I mean, most universities have a CETL, some kind of centralized teaching and learning center, or there may be like a mentoring program within your own program.
Jacqueline (moderator): Thank you.
36:47 — Live Q&A: the five questions of C1.01
And what are the five questions to ask about data? Five questions to ask about data.
Scott Massey: Are we talking about the five questions of C1.01?
Jacqueline (moderator): It's not mentioned in the question, but yeah, I believe so. Okay.
Scott Massey: So the five, I'll just go through the five questions. The five questions that have been defined. One is, how effective are our faculty outside the classroom? This is brand new, was not really asked. I mean, so one is like, if you look at standard A2.05, it's really the elements that we do outside the classroom remediation, mentoring of students, admissions practices. Right. So it's really the operational day to day components outside the classroom.
Number two is, how effective is your admissions process? And that is looking at all the data. Again, how effective is it? Even if your GPAs and your students are really sky high, are you selecting the right students and are you able to detect some of those things when you are going through the matriculation process? Number three, how effective is the didactic year? And so you're measuring didactic, for example, course evaluations and outcomes.
But you're also looking basically at some other indices or nationally standardized exams that might be able to be triangulated with didactic year. Clinical year is number four. And that looks at, for example, some of the same things of appendix 14 D. That is, how effective are preceptors, how effective are the sites, and how effective are some of the other indicators, such as interpretation exams? Are the students performing well, remediation in other components as well?
And finally, number five is, how effective is your program overall? And that's a difficult question to answer. You have to look at really what are the most important overarching, I'd say, measurements that state that your program is effective. And that's the challenge you have to look at when you are going through those components. A couple of them are summative. Another one that stands out, obviously, but it doesn't stop there.
So maybe I got on the wrong foot with that question. But that was the five, the five data points I think that's what I interpreted.
39:19 — Live Q&A: changing a course mid-cohort
Jacqueline (moderator): How much can you change in the middle of a cohort cycle when you see a problem?
Scott Massey: So when I mentioned that, you know, can you change a class, I'm not talking about changing content. I'm not talking about changing the sequence of the content or changing the way you assess. But you can look at basically how well are you delivering the content. Do the students need to have more interactive components to their content? Is your assessment measuring your instructional objectives and learning outcomes?
Are you able to administer exams that are helping the students to critically think and still connect with the content? So there's things that you can do that will end up improving the class even midstream. I've done it myself. So again, I've taught classes where it was the first time and I got into the class and I thought to myself, I'm really falling short here. So I just kind of pivoted and got the students more involved.
So that's kind of an example of that.
40:27 — Live Q&A: platforms for connecting program data
Jacqueline (moderator): Are there platforms that are helpful to facilitate the interconnectedness across all aspects of a PA program? Excel spreadsheets, Google Sheets or others?
Scott Massey: Yeah, I mean, Google Sheets, Excel spreadsheets obviously can help connect the data. But, you know, ARC-PA now developed the C1.01 and C1.02 templates. So those now are are predetermined templates where you aggregate your data annually. So it's it's kind of a hub where you can put your aggregated data into each year. I would say that that's a good place to start. I mean, obviously you can have dashboards.
You can have, you know, Microsoft Power BI, you know, there's lots of things you can do, but at the very least, I mean, keep your data aggregated each year into those C1.01 and C1.02 templates. That way you'll keep up with the data and you'll be able to use it when you go through and review each of the questions.
Jacqueline (moderator): So those are all the questions that we have.
41:36 — Final thoughts: institutional support and standard A1.02
Dr. Massey, any final thoughts before we end the session?
Scott Massey: Just thank you all for coming out for this session. I mean, my hope, my hope from the session is that you will take back to your program some thoughts about how can the system be improved within my program? But secondly, how well is my institution supporting us in this endeavor? Because this is something, you know, as a consultant, I see as being one of the biggest impediments to programs, I guess, not only surviving but thriving.
So the standards are on your side, you know, A1.02 now. It's like, you know, the institution is responsible for your assessment process. So take that back and have conversations with the compliance manual, with your dean or provost. Thank you.
Jacqueline (moderator): All right. Thanks, Dr. Massey. And thanks to everyone for, well, actually, Dr. Massey, you have a final question, if it's okay: how do you get your institution to give more support? What would you recommend?
Scott Massey: I think you have to go back to number one, what the standards say. Number two, I mean, if you go to the commission actions page and you look at programs that have received an adverse decision, like probation, for example, you're going to see a lot of in common. Citations. One of those is A1.02. And that is institutional support. So you can kind of do your math and say, you know, this is this is one of the consequences of not supporting a program.
And again, I haven't got into sufficiency of faculty and staff, which is C1.02 as well. I think the combination of sufficiency, the combination of supported assessment, those are tools that you can use along with the data you collect to try to demonstrate that you need more support in your program to be able to achieve the standards.