Undergraduate Psychology Major Assessment

As a department, we strive to provide an excellent learning experience for our students.  In order to continue to improve our instruction, curriculum, and services, we regularly assess both our general studies students and all psychology majors.  Assessment data – in contrast to course grades – are not used to assess students, but the quality of our program.  The data allow us to note our strengths and improve upon our weaknesses so that our students are afforded a high quality psychology education.  In addition, we make our assessment data available so that prospective and current students, parents, and community members can see how we are performing.  For all of our assessments, our goal is to have 70% of our students receive a passing grade of 70% or better.

How are our majors performing?

We assess our students’ acquired knowledge in two ways.  First, the students are given a journal article to read and are asked to answer 10 questions based on the article.  This measure allows us to determine whether our students understand basic research concepts and can think critically about psychology research.  The following graph shows the number of students receiving a passing grade (70% or better) on this assessment measure. 

For the second measure of student knowledge, we administer a standardized exam to students in our experimental psychology courses.  The exam consists of six topic areas that are the covered throughout a psychology major’s academic career – developmental psychology, abnormal psychology, social psychology, cognitive psychology, personality psychology, and research methods.  The following graph shows the number of students who received a passing grade (350) on this assessment measure by subject area.

The our department's assessment plan can be found here.