Guide, App 3

Appendix 3: Suggestions for the External Consultants

The Visit:

External consultants will meet with the Dean at the beginning and end of the campus visit. In between, you will meet with all program faculty, a few faculty in coordinating programs, students, and support staff. As you meet with faculty, you should reassure them that individual meetings are confidential, that you are looking for broad patterns that emerge from a variety of conversations. Give all individuals the chance to talk about their own experiences, and about their own ideas and hopes for the future of this academic program. Similarly, when meeting with students, assure them that you are looking for patterns in responses, and that nothing that they say will be attributed to an individual.

At the exit sessions with the program chair and with the Dean, you will be expected to give an informal overview of your findings and recommendations, so that the written report will not contain any major surprises. This is also a time to ask final questions that will help you further your understanding of the program and its place in the institution.

The Report:

Building on the advance preparation as well as on meetings with the Dean, faculty, staff, and students, the consultants' final report (typically 12-24 single-spaced pages in length) should address the following:

• strengths and weaknesses of the program
• challenges faced by the program 
• effectiveness of assessment in the program: suitability of the program's plan for assessment, and usefulness of particular assessment activities undertaken
• responses to any specific issues raised by the program
• suggestions and recommendations for strategies the program/College might take to address weaknesses/challenges

The report should aim for a consensus view, while also making clear where consultants disagree.

Consultants are urged to consider the program within its particular Knox and national contexts. Suggestions that can be effected within the local institutional context—taking into account both its opportunities and its limitations—will be most helpful to the program. Suggestions should also take into account the program's stated learning goals, even if one recommendation may be to reconsider such goals. While consultants understandably have their own institutions ready at hand for comparison, it is most effective to put the Knox program in a larger context of best practices found (or recommended) across the field.

Before submitting the report, we ask the consultants to send a draft to the program chair for correction of any factual errors. (This step is to check factual errors only, not to debate with consultants on their analyses and interpretations.) The final report is due within one month after the visit. Consultants submit the report to the Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs (Ole J. Forsberg), who will forward it to the Dean and to the program chair for distribution to all faculty in the program.