Quality and Assessment at UNCA As an institution dedicated to providing a high quality undergraduate liberal arts education, UNCA is very serious in its efforts to monitor both the quality of instruction and the support services we provide to students. As you know by now, it costs approximately $10,000 per year for NC residents to attend UNCA full-time. What you may not fully appreciate is that the taxpayers are also supporting the cost of your education by contributing an additional $7,500 for each full-time student. To ensure that you receive a quality learning experience, we will be asking you to participate in assessment activities at different stages of your academic career. Some of these activities may seem inconvenient at the time, such as filling out a survey form prior to registering for classes, but this is your chance to tell us how good a job we are doing and to help us improve. Student responses to survey projects play a direct role in helping UNCA make the tough decisions about which faculty receive promotions and tenure, identifying priorities among many competing campus needs and how we allocate human, physical, and financial resources to improve your education and your time with us. For example, this past year, student survey responses directly led to hiring new security officers, improvements in campus lighting, and hiring more computer lab managers. In some of these assessment projects, your responses will be completely anonymous. In other cases, we will ask for your ID number for two reasons. One, it enables us to make the survey form much shorter by not asking for information that is available in our student records; and two, it allows us to conduct longitudinal follow-up studies of students. In all cases, you can be assured of complete confidentiality, as we will never release assessment data so that any student can be identified. Here is a quick overview of some of the assessment projects that we may ask for your participation. Beginning with this orientation program, we will ask you to complete the New Student survey. While some of the questions on this survey may seem sensitive, such as family income and parent education level, the state legislature is very interested in knowing the characteristics of the families we are serving. This type of information helps to keep the tuition and fees in NC public colleges the third cheapest among the 50 states. While you are enrolled in classes, we will be asking you to rate the quality of instruction. UNCA carefully considers student opinions on faculty teaching performance in making decisions on faculty pay, promotion, and tenure. During your sophomore year, you may be asked to provide an assessment of your educational experience and satisfaction with various campus programs and services. All sixteen UNC schools are required by the state to collect this information for at least 90% of the sophomore class. After you declare a major, you may be asked to complete the Program Assessment survey which is designed to measure student satisfaction with academic programs. As you prepare to graduate, we will ask you to complete the Graduating Senior survey. This is another survey that is required of all 16 public universities in NC. Finally, as alumni, we will be back in touch asking about your experiences in graduate school, jobs you have had, and how you look back on your UNCA experience. Look for the results of these assessment projects on UNCA's web site at www.unca.edu/survey.       Last Update: 5 August 1999