Redesign of the Liberal Arts Education; Evaluations and Records; and Strengths and Weaknesses of the Academic Program. In: Self Study Report (1974)

The Redesign of the Liberal Arts Education; Evaluations and Records; and Strengths and Weaknesses of the Academic Program was published in the January 1974 Self Study Report.

Redesign of the Liberal Arts Education
Some difficulties have been experienced...which must be corrected. Specifically, major problems are:


 * orientation of new faculty, administrators, and students to the new roles they must fulfill in the Hampshire program.
 * providing relief and redress for students and faculty for whom the advising relationship is inadequate.
 * inadequate modes of communication for keeping each other informed.
 * constant difficulty with scheduling activities whose time requirements overlap.
 * program and materials budgets which provide far less support than creative ideas can absorb.
 * a certain degree of rigidity and separateness in School planning and procedures. This makes difficult creative cross-School collaboration by faculty and students.
 * variation in standards applied by examiners to examination performance, especially at the Division II level of concentration where the need to demonstrate achieved competence with a body of scholarship is paramount. (p.5)

Evaluations and Records
Hampshire's early planning included the idea that students would not be given grades for course work, but would receive written evaluations instead. In the first year of operation, the Academic Council voted that all students in Divisions I and II would be required to write evaluations of their work in each course or independent study project. These evaluations were to be given to the instructor or supervisor, who would also write an evaluation of the student's work. Both evaluations would be sent to the student's adviser, who would discuss them with the student and then send them to the student's Academic File in the Central Records Office. It was also voted that these evaluations would be for internal use only; students who wished to have evaluative statements for use outside the College (the Placement File) would ask their instructors and supervisors to write separate statements.

When students began to ask for these separate statements (often a year or two after the work had been done), it became apparent that the system was inefficient and cumbersome, and faculty were asked to do evaluations on a two-part form which allowed for a statement for the Placement File (to be sent outside the College only at the student's request) to be done at the same time as that for the internal file. These course evaluations were often requested by other institutions for purposes of calculating transfer credit or for graduate school admissions.

Problems with this system have been numerous. Many students never completed their evaluations for some of their courses and projects. Although Academic Council legislation says that in such cases advisers will call into question the academic good standing of students who do not complete evaluations, that was almost never done. Courses or projects for which no evaluations exist may not be listed on the student's transcript; when transcripts are needed, the evaluations are sometimes written long after the course was done.

Some faculty members have been derelict in completing evaluations of student work, even when the student's own evaluation has been turned in promptly at the end of a term. Evaluation which comes a term or a year late, or never, does not give adequate feedback to students who want to know where they stand. In many cases, the faculty evaluations were inadequate either for feedback to students or for use outside the College, sometimes consisting merely of "I agree with Mary's evaluation". Faculty have complained that writing evaluations for every student's work is both overly time-consuming and tends to become meaningless; the same vague phrases are used repeatedly, and in larger classes it is difficult for the faculty to know each student well enough to write meaningful evaluations. (p.66-67)

Strengths and Weaknesses of the Academic Program
For the students at Hampshire College the following strengths of the academic program may be noted:


 * Being responsible for the design and pace of one's academic studies can produce rapid and enjoyable academic progress. Preliminary survey work by the Office of Institutional Research and Evaluation on the impact of Hampshire on its students shows that a sizable proportion report enjoying their studies, having frequent intellectual discussions with their peers, and being deeply engaged in their program of study.
 * The basic goal of becoming self-educating is being accomplished increasingly by our students in the judgment of our faculty who supervise them.
 * Students frequently report a genuine sense of enjoyment with their work.

The weaknesses of the program for students are as follows:


 * Students encountering difficulty with the program may not be identified early so that supportive and remedial assistance may be given.
 * Students who design programs which are beyond the capacity of the College or the Five College area may not learn this in time to avoid having to transfer or take an extra term.
 * Students failing to take seriously the need for sound transcripting materials may suffer permanent loss of some aspect of their performance record.
 * A student may be greatly frustrated and angered by the unavailability of faculty for individual consultation.
 * The student who does not become engaged with intellectual life may become isolated in the community to the point of being totally unproductive personally and wasteful of the College's resources.

From the point of view of the faculty the strengths of the program are:


 * The question of pedagogical success of course offering or other instructional mode must be constantly addressed with consequent strengthening of teaching.
 * The appeal of the teacher's offerings is in competition with that of all similar faculty in the Valley with a consequent heightening of awareness about one's offerings.
 * The steady demand of students for tutorial advice enhances the opportunity for maintaining breadth and involving students in one's own areas of scholarship.
 * One's research and scholarship may be directly reflected in course instruction.
 * The School structures provide many opportunities to be engaged in teaching and scholarship with persons from other fields.

The weaknesses of the program from the point of view of the faculty are:


 * The demand that formal and informal instruction be modulated across the divisions requires new and different skills and ways of thinking about teaching which must be essentially self taught.
 * The cost of participation in the academic organization places heavy demands against one's teaching.
 * Faculty report personal satisfaction with their own teaching and work and a high degree of dissatisfaction with the accomplishments of the program, suggesting that there are standards of excellence and objectives possible which are not yet being realized.
 * Many new faculty, for whom this is their first post, have little or no basis for comparing the quality of their work and that of their students against performance in more traditional comparable settings.
 * Faculty find it difficult to be facilitative and supportive of the students' intellectual life when it may not be of sufficient interest to themselves.
 * The absence of curricular structures creates confusion and conflict around the designation of scholarly areas for the recruitment of new appointees.
 * There are not many guidelines for deciding what type of faculty skills should be recruited next.

The strengths of the curricular offerings may be summarized as follows:


 * The emphasis on inquiry at the Division I level is successful in encouraging students to attempt subject areas and subject matters to which they are not immediately attracted.
 * The variety of scholarship offered by the faculty provides a high degree of modernity and an extraordinary breadth of possibility.
 * The use of independent study and field study as a normal part of one's college options proves a rich source of experience and work which may contribute directly to academic progress in the Divisional II and III examinations.

The weaknesses of the overall curriculum may be summarized as:


 * The dependence on other Valley institutions for curricular strength in traditional courses may produce a greater outflow of enrollments than originally anticipated should the students become highly committed to such traditional courses. (p.72-75)