The "Rubric for Evaluating Institutional Effectiveness" was developed by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges of the Western Association for Schools and Colleges. The Rubric is to be used as a tool by colleges as they do self-assessment, by accreditation evaluation teams as they examine colleges' adherence to the Standards of Accreditation, and by the Commission as it evaluates institutions.
The purpose of the rubric is to provide some common language that can be used to describe a college's level of adherence to the standards, as well as to provide a developmental framework for understanding each institution's actions toward achieving full compliance with standards. The sample behaviors described in each text box of the rubric are examples of behavior that, if characteristic of an institution, would indicate its stage of implementation of the standards.
For more than a decade, the Commission's Standards of Accreditation have required institutions to engage in systematic and regular program review as well as short and long-term planning and resource allocation processes that support the improvement of institutional and educational effectiveness. The 2002 Standards of Accreditation have added student learning outcomes assessment and improvement as important components to the required institutional processes of evaluation, planning and improvement.
As teams and the Commission evaluate institutional and educational effectiveness, these three areas - program review; use of data and analyses to inform institutional planning and improvement, and assessment of student learning - consistently emerge as areas in which institutions seem to need additional guidance. The Commission, colleges, and teams have all indicated they need a device other than pure narrative for understanding and describing how well colleges have done in reaching full compliance with the standards. This rubric provides a tool for greater consistency in descriptive narratives.
