U.S.U. Political Science Department

Data Based Decisions:

Continuing Improvement

Challenges in the Political Science Department

Exit Survey

On the whole, the assessment data compiled by the Political Science Department reflect quite favorably on the department. But these data also point to the need to collect more data and different kinds of data than we have been collecting. In particular, the current Political Science exit survey has deficiencies as an assessment tool. Most of the data it generates pertain to the value of particular courses and the effectiveness of individual faculty members as teachers and advisors, not to the attainment of programmatic objectives or to the overall strengths and weaknesses of our programs. In response to this situation, the department has created a new exit survey, and it will replace the current survey with this new survey during 2007. The new survey appears in an appendix to this section of the assessment report.

Program Challenges Identified in the Political Science Department Exit Survey

In the exit survey data from 1999-2005, the most commonly offered suggestion for program improvement was to strengthen our career counseling. This finding caught the department somewhat off guard, as the department faculty regard career planning as an important component of our advising, and the student evaluations of the U.S.U. Government Internship Program and our innovative Careers in Government course have been extremely positive over the years. The department may, however, need to improve the outreach of the Careers in Government course and the internship program; three questions in our new exit survey have been included partly to gauge this outreach, and to suggest how we might broaden it. The department has also enlisted the faculty in a more sustained and consistent effort to distribute to their advisees the very useful American Political Science Association handbook Careers and the Study of Political Science. The department will discuss other possible improvements in its career counseling in its meetings over the next year.

The second most frequent exit survey recommendation was for the department to improve its communication with its undergraduate majors. The department acknowledges that it needs to update its web page more frequently than it sometimes has in the past. The department is currently searching for resources that would enable it to assign responsibility for the web page to a permanent webmaster. The department is also exploring the possibility of publishing a department newsletter, with resource constraints again being an issue.

Several students also mentioned in the exit surveys that they wished that the department could offer a wider range of upper division courses. The department does its best to balance resource allocations among its upper division, lower division, and graduate course offerings, and it will remain alert to opportunities to adjust these allocations to meet the needs of our students more effectively.

ProgramChallenges Identified in Political Science Capstone Courses

Faculty teaching the Political Science capstone courses have observed that some of the students entering the course have little understanding of Political Science research design. They have also noted that perhaps one-fourth to one-third of the students entering these courses have inadequate to barely adequate writing skills. The department has wrestled with these problems for several years. The department curriculum has been designed to teach students the fundamentals of research design in Political Science Research Methods (Political Science 3000), a required course for Political Science majors. Largely because the course has a significant quantitative component, many students put off taking Political Science Research Methods for as long as possible. The department responded to this problem by making Political Science 3000 a prerequisite to Political Science 4990, the Political Science capstone seminar. In years past, however, this prerequisite requirement could not be enforced, largely because the department does not have enough qualified faculty to offer Political Science 3000 more than twice yearly. Thus, many students were enrolling in Political Science 4990 and Political Science 3000 simultaneously, and some were taking the capstone seminar prior to taking Political Science 3000.

This year, the department has tried to relieve the bottleneck in Political Science 3000 by experimenting with a new, large enrollment format for the course. Additionally, the department is now strictly enforcing the prerequisite requirement for Political Science 4990. We do not yet have any basis for determining whether this adjustment in our curriculum will improve student preparation for Political Science 4990. We also anticipate that within the next two years a retirement from the ranks of our faculty will disrupt the experimental arrangement with Political Science 3000, forcing us to revisit the entire issue.

Our faculty work diligently to develop writing skills in our students, and our exit interviews indicate that we are teaching writing very well. Nearly all of our courses require essay exams, and most require analytical papers or research papers. Many of the faculty have, however, moved away from requiring traditional semester-length research papers in their courses. This change has been motivated partly by a recognition that the internet has created a serious, highly pervasive plagiarization problem within the university. Thus, the faculty have strived to restructure writing assignments to make them more plagiarization-proof. Several faculty now monitor the progress of paper writing very carefully, requiring students to submit papers at various stages of development, and all the faculty scrutinize final submissions for evidence of plagiarization.

Enrollment growth in our upper division courses, with enrollments of 50 or more now being the norm, have also prompted the faculty to cut back somewhat on writing assignments. The department has discussed at length strategies that we might employ to offer more sections of upper division courses, so as to bring the average enrollment in these courses down. Budget constraints have prevented us from implementing any such strategy over the past three years, but we remain aware of the need to reduce these enrollments as best we can in future.

The Political Science Department faculty believe that deficiency in student writing skills is a university-wide issue that is at least partly the result of an insufficient emphasis on writing in the secondary schools and community colleges. A significant proportion of the students in our introductory courses appear unable to write a coherent essay in proper English. Most of these students steadily improve their writing skills as they advance through the Political Science or the Law and Constitutional Studies major, but improvement to a level we consider satisfactory for a graduate in our majors is a tall order. The department hopes that as the university progresses with the assessment of its programs, the university will recognize that deficiency in student writing skills is a university-wide issue that should be addressed through a university-wide plan for continuing improvement.