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NWCCU Accreditation: Staff

FVCC campus guide to the Year 7 Comprehensive Evaluation and Site Visit by NWCCU, Spring 2020

Possible Questions for Staff

Any NWCCU Eligibility Requirement or Accreditation Standard is fair game for a question from an evaluator. Evaluators will likely be particularly interested in your perspectives on FVCC’s student profile, mission, core themes, challenges and adaptability, sustainability (both financially and in terms of the quality and competitiveness of academic offerings and student services), and interactions between/among faculty, staff, students, and administrators. Below is a series of questions we expect the NWCCU evaluators to ask.

  1. How does your division / department support the institution’s mission and/or core themes? How do your goals and initiatives promote the institution’s mission?
  2. What are the primary, most important, changes you have implemented to improve your division / department?
    • What data or information did you use to determine these specific changes were necessary?
    • What data or information did you (or will you) use to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of these changes?
    • To date, how effective have these changes been? What is working well – and what is not?
    • How did these changes support the mission and core themes?
  3. Please describe how your division / department has participated in strategic planning and implementation.
  4. What are the primary challenges your division / department has had to overcome since the last NWCCU site visit (Spring 2012)?
  • What challenges do you currently face?
  • What challenges are on the horizon?
  • How do you see the institution, or your division / department, addressing and overcoming those challenges?
  1. Are your professional development needs being met?  Please describe.
  2. Do you feel safe on campus?  Why or why not?
  3. Describe your experience with the evaluation process.  How often are you evaluated?  Is the process beneficial?
  4. How are students supported on campus?  How do you know that you are meeting student needs?
  5. What does shared governance mean to you?  Please describe what shared governance looks like on this campus.
  6. Evaluators may ask questions about specific Accreditation Standards. Examples include the following:

Standard

Question

1a, 5a, 5b

Is FVCC’s mission well understood across campus?  Are staff views and concerns incorporated into the institution's goals?

1a, 5a

Do you think FVCC’s mission drives decisions, practices, and resource/budget allocation?

5b

How well does the institution evaluate its resources and capacity?

1a, 5a, 1b, 3b1, 3b2

Does the institution use evidence from assessments to make curriculum decisions?  How?

3a1

Is the institution’s planning process participatory?

3a2

Does the administration communicate effectively with staff?

3a3, 3a4

Are the results of the planning and implementation processes shared with staff?  Are they transparent?

4a1, 4b1

Does the institution engage in ongoing systematic collection and analysis of meaningful, assessable, and verifiable data to measure achievement?

4a2, 4b2

Is evaluation of departments and services systematic and effective?  Is the assessment process effective in designing improvements and changes?

4a4

Is there a holistic evaluation of alignment, correlation, and integration of programs and services?

4b3

Are assessment results made publicly available in a timely manner?