VIII. Assessment Report

During the two years leading up to the preparation of this report, an ad hoc committee of Physics Department instructors (both tenured and non-tenure-track) devised an assessment plan and began its implementation. This report summarizes our first attempts to asses the Physics BS degree program. Seven out of the ten assessment-plan outcomes were addressed.

Since this is a new activity for our department, a considerable shift in the culture is required in order to focus on global student learning outcomes. The kinds of measurements reported here are not unusual, but they are uncommon to physicists who pride themselves on developing and applying well-designed and calibrated instruments and who refuse to draw conclusions from small data sets. Having low-quality data (i.e., having large or unknown error bars) and no prior results from which to seek trends, the data sets gathered during this first brief reporting period primarily serve as benchmarks for future assessment.

Objective I: “Graduates of the Physics Department will have a comprehensive knowledge of undergraduate physics.”
Outcome 2: “Students will do well in advanced courses which presuppose understanding of physics at a more elementary level.”

Prior to the fall 2003 advising period, the Director of Undergraduate Programs met with the instructors of the core undergraduate courses required of Physics majors and discussed the status and performance of the students taking these courses. Two items of concern were identified; they are:
1) Most students transferring to NCSU’s Physics program from other institutions are inadequately prepared in their previous physics and mathematics courses.
2) A few topics which are important for appropriate treatment of the material in the core physics courses are apparently no longer taught in the prerequisite or corequisite mathematics courses.
In order to be certain that these two concerns are affecting students other than just those presently taking the core courses, the Director of Undergraduate Programs will meet with the course instructors semiannually prior to the advising period each semester. If these difficulties persist, possible solutions will need to be considered.

Objective I: “Graduates of the Physics Department will have a comprehensive knowledge of undergraduate physics.”
Outcome 3: “Students will be satisfied with the over-all quality of their physics education.”

Responses to the Open-ended, Physics Department Insert to the 2003 Graduating Student Survey (10 respondents) were tallied. Question #7 asked about satisfaction. There were ten responses.

None of the other nine questions (see Appendix IX.B) yielded usable data because of (1) the small number of respondents and (2) the wide range of opinions stated. Many of the respondents are double and triple majors with Physics not usually the first major. This cultural variation makes it more difficult to respond to the remarks. The survey sample size was ten students.

Objective II: “Graduates of the Physics Department will be able to solve physical problems in a wide range of contexts of physics.”
Outcome 1: “Students will complete extensive collections of problems in classical mechanics, electromagnetism, and quantum mechanics.”

We have collected data from PY411 (classical mechanics) and PY413 (electricity and magnetism). The instructor’s reports are in Appendix IX.C.1 and IX.C.2, respectively. The data are broken down into the subtopics appropriate for each course, in an effort to identify areas of relatively weak mastery. The numbers show a high degree of mastery in each subtopic.

Objective III: “Graduates of the Physics Department will have laboratory and computer skills appropriate for employment or further study.”
Outcome 1: “Students will complete advanced exercises in modern physics.”

This outcome is course-based and is satisfied by passing PY452, a senior laboratory.

Objective III: “Graduates of the Physics Department will have laboratory and computer skills appropriate for employment or further study.”
Outcome 2: “Students will have the opportunity to engage in research laboratories at NC State or elsewhere.”

This Outcome is assessed partly from posters that students present at undergraduate research symposia. A list of recent posters can be found in Appendix IX.D.1. The object is not to win a competition, since only a few can achieve that. Poster presentations document the student outcome, i.e., that the students on the posters have been active in undergraduate research.

This Outcome is also assessed by responses to the Graduating Senior Survey. Question #10 of the Open-ended, Physics Department Insert to the 2003 Graduating Student Survey (see Appendix IX.B) indicated that undergraduate research experience made a significant, positive impact on students. (7 responses).

Objective IV: “Graduates of the Physics Department will have a strong command of the nature of oral and written communication and of intra-group interactions in the traditions of physics.”
Outcome 1: “Students will prepare and give oral research reports appropriate for professional meetings such as those of the APS or AAS, and will prepare written reports in the format of PRL or other refereed journals.”

The oral communication assessment is made at the end of the senior laboratory course (PY452). All faculty members are invited to attend student presentations and to comment on them via special rubric prepared for that purpose. Data on one year’s class is presented in Appendix IX.E. On a scale of one to five, faculty judged performances to lie in the mid-to-upper 3 range, with the highest marks going to presentation and organization. As these are the first ever data taken to assess this outcome, they serve as a reference level from which future improvements can be measured. It is worth pointing out, that as scientific as this assessment may seem, variability from year to year can be expected, not just because different students present different topics, but also because the examiners are different and have not been trained in the same way.

Objective V: “Graduates of the Physics Department will do well in finding employment or admission to graduate study. ”
Outcome 1: “Students will be competitive in the employment markets and professional programs”

This outcome is assessed by the Open-ended, Physics Department Insert to the 2003 Graduating Student Survey (see Appendix IX.B, questions #1 through #5). It seems that with the 2003 cohort, at least, the Survey comes too early in the hiring season to be a good measure of employment success.