Overview of Assessment and Programmatic Change

Office of the Associate Dean

Over the past 10 years there have been several personnel and structural changes in this office. The position of Associate Dean was first changed to a Dean of Academic Advising. During the tenure of the latter, the position came to include oversight of the College's Office of Co-Curricular Life (following the resignation of the Dean of Student Affairs). When the Dean of Academic Advising and Co-Curricular Life left the College to take another position, the position reverted to an Associate Dean of Academic Affairs following a transitional year in which two Assistant Deans shared the position. A Dean of Co-Curricular Life was hired during that transitional period.

The current Associate Dean was one of the two transitional Assistant Deans, and has been serving in the Dean's Office, with major responsibilities for Orientation and academic advising, since the summer of 1997. A number of changes were made over this period of time in response to several perceived problems and changes put into effect by the Senior Staff.

Retention

The Dean's Office, and primarily the Office of the Associate Dean, had been responsible for maintaining retention statistics for the College. The former Dean of Academic Advising had chaired the College's Enrollment Committee, which sought to identify the causes of attrition and develop strategies for dealing with these. After the Enrollment Committee was disbanded, responsibility for retention statistics was moved over to the Registrar/Director of Institutional Research.

While the Office of the Associate Dean is no longer responsible for retention data, we have continued to conduct exit interviews with students who leave the college. This information is compiled on an annual basis and is available for any further study.

Orientation Anthologies

During the tenure of the Dean of Academic Advising, steps were taken to increase the academic component of the Orientation period for new students. For several years, incoming students participated in WOW (Workshop on Writing), which was conducted over a period of several days during Orientation by student writing mentors trained for this purpose by the Academic Resource Center. While this program did succeed in giving Orientation a more academic flavor, after several years it was felt that there simply was not enough time to do this right, and the Orientation period was too stressful for incoming students to be able to take real advantage of the workshop.

The Dean of Academic Advising also came up with the idea of an anthology of readings for new students. The idea was that incoming students would have a body of common readings to share. The first anthology included readings dealing with women's education. It was not an unqualified success. The interim Assistant Dean (now the Associate Dean) produced, in the summer of 1997, a new anthology containing academic and creative writing by faculty and students. These anthologies were sent to incoming students during the summer, and they were asked to return a postcard indicating which writings interested them the most. During the Orientation period they attending a discussion led by the author of the reading. This, too, met with mixed success, as the incoming students were not really prepared to deal with the sorts of academic writing represented in the faculty contributions.

We also discovered, after surveying students about their Orientation experience, that what they felt was really missing from Orientation was a better sense of the College itself.

The following year, the Associate Dean compiled a new anthology, called "Tradition and Change." The anthology contains various sections: selections by alumnae, arranged by decade, narrating the story of the college's development, selections of articles from the Sweet Briar student newpaper, arranged by topic, and papers written by students and faculty in which several important moment's in the college's history are researched.

One of the goals of putting together this final version of the Anthology, which has been used for the past three years, was to show incoming students that there is no one "voice" of Sweet Briar: that the debate over ideas and traditions is a valuable tradition in itself. This was done as a response to many of the exit interviews done with students leaving the College, many of whom felt that they did not fit in to the image they perceived to apply to all Sweet Briar students.

During the Orientation period students are required to attend a session led by an upper-class student Orientation leader in which several of these readings are discussed. These sessions appear to have been reasonably successful.

Eligibility Issues: Contract Probation

Following the completion of each semester, the College's Eligibility Committee meets to consider the cases of students whose academic performance has not met minimum standards. Students may be declared ineligible to continue or placed on academic probation or warning, some being told that they must meet a specific goal for the following semester in order to remain at the college.

In the Spring of 1998 the Associate Dean recommended that the Eligibility Committee implement a new kind of academic probation: along with the student's probationary status, she is required to sign an academic agreement with the Associate Dean, the Academic Resource Center, and, when appropriate, Health Services and Counselling Services. While some terms of the contract vary depending on the student's circumstances, all students on contract are required to attend all classes, turn in all work on time, and meet with a peer mentor in the Academic Resource Center once a week. Peer mentors are required to report to the Associate Dean and the Director of the Academic Resource Center following each meeting with a student, which allows us to follow each of these students' progress throughout the semester.

Over the past two years, the contract system appears to have benefitted many students. Some even opt to continue on contract after they have been removed from probation because they appreciate the opportunity to have someone monitor their progress.

The contract system was also the impetus for developing an on-line reporting system for the Academic Resource Center. This system insures that records of all peer mentoring and tutoring that goes on in the ARC will be communicated to the Dean's Office and the Director of the Academic Resource Center.