A Portfolio Based Assessment Program

In this paper we describe the process, successes, and pitfalls of the decade-old portfolio assessment program at the Colorado School of Mines (CSM). We w ill also discuss how we anticipate building a new version of the assessment program into our current campus-wide curriculum reform efforts. CSM has agreed on its over all educational goals and has articulated them in a P rofile of the CSM Graduate; these goals determine what materials are collected for the portfolios we maintain and evaluate for s elected students. The data compiled from annual portfolio reviews help the faculty to identify strong and weak asp ects of our programs and address the latter in a conti nuous improvement loop.