/Division of Educational and Institutional Effectiveness
Office of Educational Effectiveness

Frequently Asked Questions

Assessment is an ongoing process used to inform campus decisions regarding curriculum, instruction and University services.  The Office of Educational Effectiveness focuses on the assessment of student learning in academic degree programs. 

Each SUNY institution must conduct assessment continuously for two basic reasons. First, it is a requirement of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. Campuses must provide evidence of their continuous evaluation and improvment of academic programs and administrative services.  Second, Stony Brook University is strengthened by a culture which values assessment and the continuous improvement philosophy which accompanies it. Ultimately, the goal of assessment is to enhance student learning and the educational experience we provide to our student body. Who does assessment?

The assessment process is collaborative and includes faculty, students, and administrators at all levels.  It is structured and “owned” by program faculty in exactly the same way as curriculum and instruction.  All standalone degree and certificate programs must conduct  assessment on an ongoing basis. This process is supported by your designated Assessment Coordinators with expertise from the Office of Educational Effectiveness.

Who is my "Assessment Coordinator?"  Since 2013, each department has designated an indivdiual  who is primarily responsible for assessment activities of an individual degree  program and who serves as a liaison to OEE. This person is known as your “assessment coordinator.” Visit our Program Assessment webpage to view a chart of assessment coordinators listed by program. If you need to change or update your designated assessment coordinator, please email educationaleffectiveness@stonybrook.edu . 

Assessment is what you make of it!  There are some skeptics and there are examples of  institutions whose administrators focus too much or too little on assessment. The  goal of the Office of Educational Effectiveness is to conduct “practical assessment” which adds value to SBU's curriculum and instruction by leveraging what departments are doing already to improve education, and providing education and resources on best practices to guide the assessment process. 

However, to foster a sustainable culture of cyclical assessment (rather than waiting and doing a heavy lift every seven years), OEE recommends that departments and programs assess at least one program learning objective per year, facilitating incremental annual improvements. To document this progress, programs should provide the following deliverables: 

  1. An assessment plan, including clearly stated program learning objectives, a curriculum map, and a timeline with measures, benchmarks, and additional details for conducting assessment
  2. A short annual report from each program to briefly describe the assessment activities and the actions taken during the preceding academic year.
  3. A comprehensive report at least every seven years.   

The goal of assessment is to reveal where there might be room for improvement in instruction or curriculum.  While grades can give a high-aggregate view of whether students are doing well and  if a curriculum is working as designed, but they do not reveal the fine-grained information produced by careful assessment of learning objectives.  In addition, responsible assessment includes both direct measurements and indirect measurements to inform assessment resuts.  With final grades alone,  you are not receiving data from any indirect measurements, and therefore do not have enough objective information to make informed decisions about your curriculum or instruction. 

Consider the following examples of assessment in context:

Farming: Farmers evaluate their yield each growing season and adjust processes and allocation of resources to maximize quality.  Farmers react to circumstances beyond their control, such as weather, market demand, government regulations, development of new technology and research, and supply chains, to name a few.  The quality of food in your supermarket is a result of continuous assessment processes aimed at optimizing quality with many other factors.

Healthcare: Healthcare professionals continuously assess the effectiveness of treatments and adjust delivery of care to maximize patient health.  Assessment occurs at all levels of the industry, from collecting measurements from individual patients to large-scale analysis and actions. The quality of affordable healthcare is a result of careful assessment through observation, measurement, evaluation, research, analysis and intuition and action.

While course evaluations are an important component of the assessment process, it is only one piece of evidence for programs to consider in their continuous improvement efforts. Course evaluations are a useful indirect assesment method that gathers information on student impressions of a course, but does not typically include information related to actual student performance in a course (unless self-reported). As described in the prior question, responsible assessment includes both direct measurements and indirect measurements to inform assessment resuts. The assessment process is more comprehensive and nuanced than consideration of course evaluations alone. 

Programs with specialized accreditation typically already have a robust and well-defined assessment process to improve their degree programs. OEE's role in relation to accredited programs is to provide support and resources as needed, to collect evidence of your existing assessment process aligned with University standards, and ensure that assessment continues on an ongoing, annual basis (rather than strictly before your accreditation self-study period or site visit).

For the purposes of Assessment, the term academic “program” refers to a degree or certificate program.  A “department” is a group of faculty who share a similar academic or research purpose.  Stony Brook has approximately 285 academic programs, distributed among about 77 academic departments, centers, or institutes. 

There are some academic units called “program,” “center” or “institute” that offers academic programs (for example, the Program in Writing and Rhetoric; Institute for Advanced Computational Science), which for this purpose is considered a department.  The charge of OEE is to establish, support, and document the ongoing academic  assessment for each of its 285 degree programs.

There are differences of opinion in the use of the terms “goals,” “outcomes,” and “objectives.” Through thoughtful discussion among various assessment working groups in 2020, OEE will use these terms in the following manner:

  • Objectives: what students should know at the end of a program or course.
  • Outcomes: what students did or achieved based on the objectives

Assessment professionals often use these terms interchangeably, but the above definition is how these terms are operationalized at SBU.