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Philip Merrill College
of Journalism
Launches Assessment Web Site
Penny Bender Fuchs
Director of Career Placement and Professional Development
Philip Merrill College of Journalism
When talk of student assessment and learning
outcomes came up for serious discussion at the Philip Merrill
College of Journalism in fall 2005, the reaction was a familiar
refrain heard elsewhere on campus – professors expressed concerns
about unnecessary mandates impinging on classroom freedom and
professorial creativity. Some asked how to quantify something so
subjective as a news lead or a feature story. Others wanted to know
why students’ grades or our national reputation as a top-tier
journalism school wasn’t enough to show how well we taught our
students.
Disgruntled reactions aside, assessment was
coming. Not only mandated by the Middle States Commission on Higher
Education, but the College’s own accrediting board, the Accrediting
Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications, began
enforcing assessment standards in 2004. The College, up for
re-accreditation in 2009, would need an assessment program in place
long before then. Sensitive to faculty concerns, Dean Thomas Kunkel
promised they would be intimately involved in the process but not be
held hostage by it; that assessment would serve as a tool for
curriculum improvements, not dictate course structure.
This fall, the College launched
www.jportfolio.umd.edu, its new online assessment
Web site designed to measure student learning in fundamental areas
of the curriculum. Conceived by administrators and a faculty
committee
and designed by the college’s technology director, the Web site
database successfully collected assessments of more than 500
students by 33 faculty and adjunct instructors.
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