For context, other Maryland publics are working on a 7-10 year cycle for external program reviews. External reviews should be framed as part of the ‘panorama view’ we build of a program’s ‘health and livelihood.’

A developmental process supports a deliberate, manageable conversation about a department’s health; it has many parallels to how a formal “accreditation visit” unfolds.

The process has four phases, over three semesters:

Phase One: planning (Semester One)

Phase Two: self study (Semester Two)

Phase Three: visit (Semester Three)

Phase Four: follow-up (Semester Three)

Scale of program review

Most departments (e.g., programs with a major and a minor) would complete a review process that includes 2 on-site reviewers.

Departments/CDSAs could request a third on-site reviewer, perhaps because of the number of programs they support or because of a specific expertise/lens they want to use to frame their external review
Small programs (e.g., a CDSA minor) would have a single reviewer, and per the program’s preference, that reviewer could engage with the programs in person or remotely.
- A small program could request an additional reviewer as part of a proposal for a growth plan

Timing external reviews

Working with a current cluster of 23 units, over a 7-8 year period, we’d be averaging 2-3 reviews/yr.
The broad plan is to have at least one program/CDSA in each Phase at all times (planning, self-study, visit, follow-up)
To restart, we’d ask for volunteers
Relaunch as of Fall 2023

Program Review Costs (back of envelope)

Cost Per Reviewer

Honorarium $1,000

Travel $800

Lodging $450 (3 nights)

Food $100

Total $2,350

General Costs

Planning Retreat $250

Food during review $250

Total $500

Procedures for External Review of Academic Departments/Programs

The goal of our external review program at SMCM is to continue to improve the quality of the academic program and to strengthen conditions for teaching and learning. NB: Academic Affairs may adjust some of these processes or timelines for accreditation or program approval reviews that are required by a state or external agency and their subsequent guidelines.

There are four phases to an external review: Planning, Self-Study, Visit, and Follow-up.

Phase 1: Planning the Review (to take place over one semester)

As of Fall 2023, all departments and programs will engage in an external review every seven (or, should scheduling require, eight) years. It is wise to schedule reviews when all or nearly all department members are on campus; accelerating or delaying a review may be relevant depending on the number of faculty on leave from a program during its scheduled year.

The chair/coordinator will first meet with the Associate Dean the year before the department is initially scheduled for external review to confirm if the proposed schedule is workable. This will enable the Office of Academic Affairs to budget appropriately for upcoming external reviews. The chair/coordinator and Associate Dean will also review the steps involved. The timing of the external review will be confirmed no later than a month after that initial meeting. Academic Affairs will notify the Office of Institutional Research of the timing as well, so that office can begin preparing its baseline dossier for programs to use.

Phase 2: The Self-Study (assembling documentation for the external review; to take place during the second semester)

The department/program begins its work for the external review at least a semester in advance of the visit, but preferably a year before.

Chairing the Self-Study

In most cases, the department/program chair is the de facto self-study chair. However, with the consensus of the department, a tenured member may take on the role of the self-study. During the self-study semester, the chair of the self-study is eligible for one course release. For small programs, the course release may be allocated to the coordinator or any designated member of the affiliated faculty who will be responsible for the self-study.

Self-Study Retreat: proposing objectives

The self-study chair schedules a retreat, or series of meetings, to discuss the outline for the external review. As opposed to a traditional checklist of required topics to be addressed in every departmental self-study, the retreat is meant to generate the proposed objectives for the self-study, which would vary in each cycle and from program to program. The self-study should aim to address between 3-5 objectives for consideration by the external team. If a department wants to consider a new curricular path, then that would be a focus of discussion and documentation. If the department also has concerns about supporting junior faculty research, that would of course take the self-study on a second path. It’s recommended that the Associate Dean lead the initial conversation around setting objectives and then allowing the department to have the retreat time for discussion. Following the retreat, proposed objectives will be put forward to the Associate Dean for finalization in consultation with the VPAA. It’s the hope that this format allows for the program to take the lead in identifying areas for growth or reflection. Should there be pressing concerns not represented in the proposed objectives, the VPAA reserves the right to incorporate those questions among the finalized objectives.

At this point, the program should begin collecting the information necessary to address the self-study objectives, and creating the materials it intends to provide for the reviewers. The Office of Institutional Research can provide relevant data in preparation for the review, as well as a platform for organizing the data.

Drafting the Self-Study Document

Preparation for an external review entails a careful internal review of the program’s self-study objectives. Below are some broad recommendations on how to build a self-study with those objectives as the focus.

Agenda for External Review: Once the department’s self-study objectives have been determined, what general and specific issues or questions does the department wish the external reviewers to examine? What does the department hope to gain from the external review? At this point, the department should clarify any useful context regarding the self-study objectives as they influence curriculum, major requirements, recruitment/retention, departmental equity measures, interdisciplinary commitments, personnel issues, philosophical disputes, future directions for the department, scholarship, or other issues pertinent to the external review, and draft a charge to the review team.
Goal Setting: What are the program's goals in addressing the self-study objectives? Are they aspirational? Corrective? Exploratory? Where does the department want to be in five to ten years? How do these goals align with and/or reflect the program mission? The institutional mission?
Implementation: How does the program seek to achieve those goals (curriculum, sequencing of courses, teaching practices)? How does it assess whether it meets the goals?
Data Collection: What does the available data reveal about the self-study goals?
- The department/program should have a conversation with the Coordinator of Transparent Teaching/Assessment about its student learning assessment system structure and findings.
Self-Study Conclusions: What is the department's own "pre-review" assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of its program(s), especially in regards to curriculum, sequencing of courses, teaching practices and scholarship?

These items are to be shared with the Associate Dean and the external reviewers. The Associate Dean then meets with the whole department (or with the steering committee of the interdisciplinary program) to go over the agenda for the review and the review process. The Associate Dean and department members discuss their individual responsibilities and deal with questions regarding any aspect of the review process.

The External Review Materials

The chair should plan to assemble materials to be sent to external reviewers for their study at least 45 calendar days prior to the formal visit. Some of the materials will be collected from existing materials and others will have to be created for the review. In addition to the assessment of departmental strengths and challenges and the agenda for the external review discussed above, external reviewers should receive an electronic file including: the program’s most recent external review, CVs for all members, direct links to the program’s website and/or other relevant online materials, departmental handouts, syllabi from courses (possibly including a statement of how each course fits into the major or functions as a service course), major requirements, examples of senior theses (if applicable), departmental strategic planning documents (mission, vision, values statement) if any, information about department alumni and what careers they follow, and any other materials department members feel will be useful.

Per the program’s preference, the review materials will be formatted as either a Google Site or as a single PDF. Chairs will have the support of an Academic Affairs intern for this formatting work.

Selection of External Reviewers

After the review materials are mostly developed, the program may then work with Academic Affairs on identifying possible external reviewers (note here that this timeline is intentional to avoid the unconscious desire to write the self-report with too specific an audience in mind). Programs undergoing a full review will create a roster of at least five possible team members; programs undergoing a simplified review will propose three possible reviewers. The composition of the team should be wide enough to cover the span of the department's offerings and outlooks. At least one member should be from a comparable liberal arts college. It is often good to choose someone from a research university where our graduates have gone for further study since there needs to be a balance between the internal integrity of an undergraduate program and its connection to the larger academic world. How the department understands this relationship is part of what the review should explore. Short summaries of possible external reviewers should be forwarded to the Associate Dean, along with their contact information.

The department chair issues invitations to reviewers after their approval by the VPAA.

A date mutually agreeable to the Associate Dean and department is set. Visits last two to three days, preferably over a weekend to avoid excessive travel costs. Typically, a team arrives on Wednesday, meets the department for dinner, spends Thursday and Friday in interviews, reserving time on Friday for a debrief with the AVPAA and VPAA.. The team may plan for either a working dinner or working breakfast to build an outline before departure on Saturday.

Phase 3: The Visit (to be undertaken in the third semester)

The department creates a detailed schedule which includes meetings with the VPAA, the Associate Dean, all regular members of the department/program faculty (or in some cases the steering committee), students from the department, colleagues from cognate departments or programs, and anyone else that the department, the Associate Dean, or the review team might designate. Each member of the review team should visit a class for a sustained period of time (hour or more).

The VPAA and Associate Dean have an exit interview with the entire review team to find out their first reactions. Sometimes reviewers have specific questions, arising from the visit, about how the report should be written. For example, there are occasionally things the team wants to share with the VPAA that they do not wish to make part of the official report.

The reviewers are expected to provide a comprehensive written report in a timely fashion—no more than a month after the visit. Typically, the reviewers will consult with one another after their campus visit and will submit a joint report; occasionally, reviewers will submit separate reports. The report comes to the VPAA and is then distributed to all members of the department and to the Associate Dean.

The reviewers are normally offered $1,000 plus expenses (least-cost travel, accommodation and meals). The Office of Academic Affairs pays for this. Based on the estimated costs listed above, the self-study chair should work with the Associate Dean to submit a budget to the Office of Academic Affairs before the visit.

Best Practices for well-run campus visits

A few suggestions for high quality review visits (produced by past reviewers at various institutions):

An advance schedule for the visit should be distributed to the review team members for their comments and proposed changes.
The entire review team should meet with every program/steering committee member.
Less time should be spent meeting informally with students (one lunch is sufficient). Instead, it’s highly recommended that the itinerary include a class visit to best illustrate the student learning environment. The class or classes selected should be heavily influenced by the objectives identified by the department.
The whole department should be gathered for some closing remarks by the team. Opening the visit with a department-wide discussion is fine, but certain issues arise during an on-campus visit that may need to be addressed in a group setting.
Visiting faculty, lecturers, and adjuncts should be invited to participate in the external review visit. If these community members prefer not to participate, they should have that option, but their observations may be very helpful.
When it receives background materials, the review team should be made aware of any pending personnel decisions.
Information about the department's financial resources, such as endowments and named professorships, should be volunteered to the review team.

Phase 4: The Follow-up (to be undertaken after the visit in the third semester)

A complete and candid written evaluation with constructive recommendations for improvements is required of each review team. Once the written report is received, the Associate Dean discusses the report with the VPAA, then the department, conveying to the chair the VPAA's views.

The department may wish to hold a second retreat or on-campus meeting to “debrief” and plan for the future after the external review has been completed. The department should produce a written response to the report; this response may form the basis for the development of a departmental plan for the future.

The department and the Associate Dean discuss the recommendations in the report, and plan a course of action in light of them, as informed by any views the VPAA may have expressed. How often meetings between the Associate Dean and the department occur will depend on how much agreement or disagreement there may be among all concerned about what to do. Sometimes recommendations involve both short and long term plans. The department should keep a written record of its plan of action with modifications as they are made over time.

As highlighted here, a department must assume that this process can take the better part of a year and a half from start to finish. There is much more to a successful review than the actual visit by the reviewers. A significant proportion of the success of the review depends both on the quality of the preparation for the visit and the dialogue among colleagues that takes place after the visit.

Appendix: Past cycles of review

Seven-Year Cycle: Schedule of Departmental Reviews: 2014 – 2021

Revised August 2017

Fall 2014

African & African Diaspora Studies

Asian Studies

Chemistry and Biochemistry

Spring 2015

Fall 2015

Physics

Music

Spring 2016

English

Philosophy & Religious Studies

Fall 2016

Spring 2017

Educational Studies (MSDE 7 year cycle)

Chemistry and Biochemistry (ACS 5 year cycle)

Fall 2017

Anthropology

Spring 2018

Sociology

International Languages and Cultures

Fall 2018

Art & Art History

Museum Studies

Spring 2019

Psychology

TFMS

Reviews Scheduled but not held

*initially paused for LEAD implementation; in 2020-2022, for pandemic.

Spring 2019

Library

Fall 2019

Environmental Studies

Math & Computer Science

Economics

Spring 2020

History

Democracy Studies

Fall 2020

Political Science

Neuroscience

Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies

Spring 2021

Biology

Core Curriculum

Fall 2021

African & African Diaspora Studies

Asian Studies

Chemistry and Biochemistry

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