Journey to Accreditation: Assessment Made Easy

Assessment is a scientific measure for assessing learning abilities of students. It measures students understanding of concepts and/or procedures by having to show what students have learned. Data are continuously gathered, analyzed and used for decision making at the program and department level assessment. In addition, assessment of program learning outcomes are among critical components of an overall program review, evaluation and continuous improvement. Assessment of student outcomes and the individual course learning outcomes are among critical components of an overall program review, evaluation and continuous improvement. Faculty tend to seek the least time consuming, yet valid and meaningful ways to prepare for and collect data for assessment purposes. A common approach for applying assessment in a course is to employ embedded questions in the assignments, quizzes, lab exercises or/and exams. The purpose of these questions is to directly address a particular course learning outcome that in turn is linked to a program learning outcome. This practice is often used to evaluate the effectiveness of a course as well as to identify any need for course modifications and improvements. When assessment is in the form of a test, then the administration, collection and the final aggregate report generation becomes a times consuming task that often introduces delays in planning. In this paper we present a webbased software tool that is primarily designed and developed for automating the course assessment process. It automates the test creation, grading and the final report generation that can help save time, reduce errors and produce variety of report summaries for better decision making.