Assessment for Advancing Equity

Curriculum-based assessment offers a powerful lever for advancing equity in the major. Units can leverage their disciplinary expertise to ensure all students have the same potential for success. Promoting student success and addressing opportunity gaps is a moral imperative, as the campus begins to address structural racism. This method of self-study shifts focus away from student performance and onto the effectiveness of our course and program designs.

Alongside educational quality, comes the University's goal to eliminate equity gaps, and to significantly increase rates of on-time graduation. Assessment is at the forefront of this mission, and a necessary practice to achieving these goals.

Over the past several years, the Division of Undergraduate Education and the Teaching + Learning Commons have worked on a number of assessment initiatives geared towards advancing equity. One of these initiatives focuses on how program review is tied to assessment. While program review occurs every seven-eight years, units routinely engage in a process of assessment for continuous improvement. We have been referring to this process as the assessment cycle.