A new assessment will determine how UNM students measure up to their peers at other institutions.
A group of randomly selected graduating seniors will receive e-mails through April 15 that invite then to participate in the Collegiate Learning Assessment.
After this academic year, at least 250 randomly selected first-semester freshmen and 250 graduating seniors can also choose to participate.
“The CLA is a measure of student learning in critical thinking, problem solving, analytical and English writing,” said Tom Root, outcomes assessment planning manager at the Office of the Provost.
UNM is participating in the Voluntary System of Accountability, where universities are required to measure education outcomes, Root said. About 400 other universities nationwide, including other public New Mexico universities, are also participating. This is the first time UNM has tried to measure the learning progress of undergraduate students, Root said.
Students will have 90 minutes to complete two to nine short essays online in a proctored setting, said Amy Korzekwa, graduate research assistant for the CLA project. The program determines the amount of short essays students will complete from a variety of questions.
“All of the prompts are supposed to be real-world kind of topics that involve some kind of critical thinking and problem solving,” Korzekwa said.
Participants will be compensated for their time. Freshmen participants will be entered into a raffle, receive a UNM shirt, UNM food service discount coupons, UNM Bookstore coupons and priority registration. Seniors will receive the same benefits with a week of free parking in any zone instead of priority registration, Korzekwa said.
During September and October, 256 entering freshmen answered the essays. As of yet, 70 seniors participated in the questions.
Kara Hermanns, freshman, said the rewards she received for filling out the CLA in the fall adequately compensated for her time spent on it.
“The incentives were definitely worth it, and so was expressing my opinion,” she said. “The test was fun and made you think about issues and answer in a detailed essay.”
Root said the test measures skills necessary for any major.
“It doesn’t matter if you are getting a Bachelor’s of Art in English or a Bachelor’s of Science in engineering — everybody needs those skills,” Root said.
The data collected will be posted on schools’ home pages to help prospective students choose which universities to attend, Korzekwa said.
UNM chose from three types of tests measuring its outcomes. Faculty chose the CLA because it wasn’t multiple-choice, and it did a better job of measuring the four areas, Root said.
“The CLA is a constructed-response test, which means you are given an open-ended, loosely defined problem,” Root said. “You are given a set of resource materials that you might use to solve the problem, and then asked how you would solve it.”
With the data collected, UNM will compare how students’ skills improve over the course of their studies and how these skills correlate with graduation, Root said.
“We are hoping to see a difference between freshmen and seniors and hopefully attribute some of that difference to the fact that they’ve been here at UNM,” Korzekwa said.
*For more information go to Unm.edu and click on “UNM’s College Portrait” under Quick Links. *
