The Assessment and Institutional Effectiveness Committee met on Feb. 2, 2021.
The meeting minutes are as follows:
Dr. Margaret Geehan opened the meeting at 1 p.m.
1. Middle States
a. Dr. Geehan said that there was not much to report. She said that the preparations for Middle States are going well and as expected. The AIE group will be asked to weigh in on the Institutional Overview, Intended Outcomes of the Self-Study and the Self-Study Institutional Priorities after Executive Team reviews them. The Working Groups are making great progress.
b. Dr. Geehan said that meetings and communications with Dr. Bonfiglio are continuing to take place.
2. Employee Satisfaction Survey
The survey items are undergoing the revisions suggested by the AIE group at its last two meetings. When a draft is ready, it will be sent to the AIE committee for review. The survey will be distributed to the campus at the end of February.
3. Core Indicator Overall Review
a. The group began the yearly review of Core Indicators in the Institutional Effectiveness (IE) Report to determine whether each CI is retained as is, revised or omitted. Also the consideration of the addition of a CI will be discussed.
b. The group started with Core Indicator Goal I — Graduation Rate and spent a large part of the meeting discussing this. The group discussed how, in evaluating data like this, such as graduation rate, the college needs to be compared to other community colleges that are its peers, not four-year schools. This is because the purposes students have for attending community colleges tend to be different. For example, the graduation rate for Hudson Valley being lower than that of Siena or Saint Rose is not always a bad thing. Students may well have enrolled at Hudson Valley to get their grades up either or to take a break before enrolling in a four-year college. It may never have been their intention to graduate from our college, so it is important to remember that when we use retention as a measuring stick for success. Many students achieve their goals at Hudson Valley and transfer.
c. Because of everything mentioned in b, Hudson Valley needs to make sure it measures itself against other community colleges and those that offer similar programs, in order to create a fair evaluation. We currently use IPEDs data based on full-time first-time students and compare our data to IPEDs data of our SUNY peers. This discounts our part-time students and students who have been to college in the past.
d. In order to fairly evaluate its success, the college needs to develop a reliable way of tracking student goal attainment. This will capture those students described above — part-time, not first-time, attending to get their GPA to transfer before graduating, taking a few courses out of personal enjoyment or skills upgrading. The role that the college’s recently implemented CRM Advise will be important in tracking student goal attainment. This is something that the college has talked about for a long time. We want to track not only when and whether or not students leave, but why they do so. Having this information will definitely help us determine what students fulfilled their goal in coming to Hudson Valley, and which didn’t.
e. We need to make sure that students who never intended to finish and graduate don’t turn into just “another attrition statistic” if they never intended to graduate in the first place. We need to make sure that whether or not we’ve helped a student reach their goals is our measuring stick for success, and not only whether or not they’ve graduated.
f. Dr. Geehan also reminded the group that the Graduation Core Indicator was a meaty one, along with the other student achievement Core Indicators like Retention and Time to Graduation. While it might appear that we didn’t get very far (there are about 22 Core Indicators) we actually did — the one we need to focus on right now because it needs the most work. Many of the excellent points and suggestions the group raised will pertain to these Core Indicators as well. The discussion was a rich and robust one, and the group raised good points, such as the Student Success Score, predictive characteristics and some of the negatives that can result, and the college’s Early Warning System. The group will pick up on Goal 2–2.3 Student Retention at the next meeting.
The meeting adjourned at 2 p.m.
Screenshots can be provided upon request.
Next meeting: Feb. 23 at 1 p.m.
Respectfully submitted,
Caitlyn Gerardi
AIE Members
Gloria Baez
Clem Campana
Colleen Ferris
Pat Gaston
Margaret Geehan
Caitlyn Gerardi
Antoinette Howard
Matt Howe
Alan Joseph
Dennis Kennedy
Pat Klimkewicz
Jim Macklin
Margaret Mann
Karen Paquette
Kathy Petley
Chrissy Smith
Joseph Stenard
Ainsley Thomas
Brian Vlieg
Dennis Wax
Ronalyn Wilson
Published: Wed, 17 Feb 2021 12:55:21 +0000 by c.gerardi