Assessment at Illinois Tech
This site provides the Illinois Tech faculty information and best practices to support our institution's commitment to student learning assessment and fulfill our responsibilities to our accreditors.
What is Assessment?
Assessment refers to the systematic measurement of student achievement of learning goals. In the assessment process, data is gathered and analyzed to determine to what extent student are meeting the learning goals.
Assessment enables faculty and other stakeholders to maintain consistency across curricula and to determine when/where curricular adjustments are needed. Assessment is a crucial part of the accreditation requirements for Illinois Tech. Most importantly, assessment is a tool to ensure that students are developing the skills they need for success.
The Assessment Cycle of Improvement
Success Stories
In the assessment of the Natural Sciences, we discovered that the learning objective of communicating science concepts and issues was not assessed. This elicited a robust faculty discussion and revision and repositioning of the learning objective to the Com designation.
The Civil and Architectural Engineering (CAEE) department, upon noticing a decline in student scores on the Professional Engineering exam in the area of hydraulics, completed analysis and revised the course contents. With more practical examples and subject-based quizzes, immediate improvement was observed that continued in subsequent review cycles.