College of Liberal Arts

French Undergraduate Programs

Assessment Criteria and Procedures

1. All students will complete a curriculum that ensures breadth in the form of a general education requirement in addition to major requirements. Standards for general education requirements are set by the College of Liberal Arts and enforced through a Senior Check system involving the student's advisor and the Dean's Office.
2. At least 90% of all undergraduate upper-division courses in French are taught by tenure-track faculty. The quality of the undergraduate teaching faculty is under the purview of the Department Chair who sees that minimum qualifications for all faculty are met.
3. All teaching assistants receive formal training in undergraduate instruction and complete 18 hours of graduate course work in French before being allowed to teach. All graduate assistants are required by the University to complete a mandatory training session in undergraduate instruction. Graduate assistants in French must further undergo a year-long training program within the Department. Graduate assistants never teach courses beyond the 100 level.
4. All students complete a minimum core course requirement before being allowed to proceed to upper division courses, in order to ensure proper preparation for advanced subject matter. A minimum grade of C will be obtained for all major courses and no course will be repeated more than once. Written assignments and/or oral presentations are required of students in every course.
5. Student teaching evaluations are administered in all courses enrolling five or more students. Results are available to individual faculty and are included by the Chair as part of the annual faculty review procedures. The current evaluation form was revised by the faculty in 1997.
6. All students are assigned a tenure-track academic advisor who meets with the student at least once each semester to review the student's progress and future plans. Transcripts are examined by the advisor to evaluate students' level of study at the entrance to the program, to monitor progress in the course of the program, and to note their final performance level.
7. Academic office hours are required by both College and departmental regulations and are monitored by the Chair of the Department.
8. All graduating seniors are required to take a written exit examination, which tests their reading comprehension skills and their ability to write grammatically correct, idiomatic French.
9. All graduating seniors are given an individual interview in French by a faculty member, who rates their oral proficiency in French along the guidelines of the scale developed by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL).

Assessment Results

1. Course-embedded performance measures are designed primarily to assess the individual student's achievement, but in certain cases performance assessments have identified student needs that the Department has addressed over the past ten years, leading to the creation of FREN 316 (1988), FREN 300 (1990), FREN 307 (1994), and FREN 510 (1994).
2. Student course evaluations show that our courses are well-received by students at all levels of instruction. French faculty are consistently rated "good" and "excellent" by their students, many of whom characterize their language teacher as "the best teacher I ever had." Student evaluations have been useful to the Department for such purposes as selection of appropriate instructional materials and considerations for reducing exam and oral performance anxiety.
3. We have the score results of our senior exit examination going back to 1984. We have learned from them that there is no discernible difference between students who have studied abroad and those who have not, in terms of reading comprehension. In terms of writing skills, students who have been abroad are almost always more successful. Outcomes on these tests have been correlated with students' experiences studying abroad and have been useful for identifying appropriate foreign study opportunities for other students at earlier stages of the program. Results of the 1998-99 exam are appended to this document.
4. We have the oral proficiency interview rating results for our graduating seniors going back to 1984 (with a few exceptions). From these we have observed that graduating French majors who have not been abroad sometimes lack the necessary oral proficiency for continuing graduate study in French or for a career in secondary teaching. We are pleased to recognize, however, that the majority of our graduating seniors have attained the ACTFL rating of "advanced," which is the minimum level required of students in the Master of Arts in Teaching program for admission to the teaching internship. A comparison of ratings from 1991-1998 is appended to this document.
5. At present we have no information about the degree completion ratio, average time to completion, percent of graduates employed in the field, and we have no mechanism for measuring alumni satisfaction with the program. Feedback from alumni about their level of satisfaction and their employment has always been positive, but it is sporadic and anecdotal in nature. Nonetheless, the French faculty have always made an effort to keep abreast of scholarly and pedagogical advances in their respective fields, and they have initiated improvements in the program whenever one was deemed necessary.