Minutes for PRAC meeting 3/18/10

Attendance:  Martin Hartog, Charlene Dellinger-Pate , Yi-Chun Tricia Lin, and Karen Cummings.  (Please note a number of PRAC members were out of town or unavailable for this meeting.  There had been prior email discussion about not meeting, which may have left confusion about whether the committee was in fact meeting on the 18th). 

PRAC Minutes for March 18, 2010

As previously reported, PRAC met on March 4, 2010 to review the self-study submitted by the Economics and Finance department.  The self-study, which included standards 1-17,  was prepared by Dr. Samuel Andoh, the department's assessment coordinator.   The first part of the meeting was taken up with evaluation and discussion of  each standard.   Dr. Samuel Andoh and Dr. Jim Thoreson met with PRAC during the last 25 minutes of the meeting to share in the discussion of the self-study and to receive PRAC's feedback.  Suggestions for revision were made and a mechanism by which PRAC members could provide further direction to Economics and Finance was identified.    Based on PRAC's assessment and in consultation with Dr. Andoh and Dr. Thoreson, PRAC came to a consensus that most of the 17 standards had not been met.  Thus, PRAC offers the recommendation for conditional approval of Economics and Finance.  According to the program review document, Economics and Finance will now have 11 months to make improvements to the program review.  This decision was presented to Dr. Andoh and Dr. Thoreson and they agreed to the conditional approval. 

Other issues:

The possibility of moving to a 7-yr cycle was discussed as was PRAC's role in providing workshops. 

Discussion focused on the following points:
7 year cycle
The consensus of this smaller group was to:
•ease into after 5 years so that we could do 5 per year (3 one semester.

•Use ELearning Vista to have pre meeting electronic discussions that could save time in our discussions.

Workshops
 In lieu of doing workshops, the group thought that departments should do the following:
•Look at checklist.

•Look at successfully reviewed programs.

•Consider having your UCF department member join PRAC if there are still concerns about how to proceed with the assessment.

•Use time that might be spent going to a workshop to meet with own department members to review the assessment checklist and requirements of the process.

There was concern about having individual members of PRAC advising departments who are under review. Some concern was expressed about the effectiveness of workshops and whether they are a good use of our time and money.

These issues will be discussed more fully in our meetings to come.

Respectfully submitted by M. Hartog and P. Kahlbaugh 3/29/10