Middle States Commission of Higher Education placed Le Moyne College’s accreditation on a warning in June of 2016 due to failure in compliance with one of the standards.

Middle States provides accreditations to more than 525 institutions all over the world and stated that Le Moyne, “May be in jeopardy because of insufficient evidence that the institution is currently in compliance with Standard 14 [Assessment of Student Learning],” in a warning issued to Le Moyne in June.

Standard 14 is stated as the “assessment of student learning demonstrates that, at graduation, or other appropriate points, the institution’s students have knowledge, skills, and competencies consistent with institutional and appropriate higher education goals,” when summarized in the “Characteristics of Excellence in Higher Education” document.

Each institution must be in line with all 14 standards set in place by Middles States to maintain or earn an accreditation. The commissioners within this organization meet three times a year to evaluate each institution’s status of their individual accreditation, to look over each one.  

Since this release of information in June, Le Moyne has made many strides to eliminate this warning, taking precautions to ensure that this accreditation remain in place. Dr. James Hannan was hired as the Dean of Learning Assessment, in addition to having been the Department Chair for the English Department. An institutional assessment committee was also added. Both worked very closely with faculty and staff to evaluate student assessment and work.

The college had a deadline of March 1 to file a report with Middle States, where Le Moyne was responsible for fulfilling a monitoring report of all the efforts and progress that has been accomplished so far, this year. By Dec. 22, Hannan had asked all departments to report where they stood, as he and the institutional com
mittee then formed the report out of this information.

Each department was in charge of assessing their own learning outcomes to discover if students were, in fact, learning the key results that were set in place for them. Bigger patterns were looked for within this assessment that transcended from individual departments. These trends were recognized, giving each department a perspective on what needs to be changed to bring the necessary help to student learning.

Some of the discoveries made were concerns with student writing as well as oral competency. This revealed that more instruction and resources need to be made available to the students. Through this, departments were given an outlook on what needs to be brought to student learning, as identifying this need is necessary for change in the future.

Regardless, this monitoring report, Hannan stated, is “internal communication that is between the college and Middle States. Only the faculty have access to it as well so that they can see how their assessment efforts are represented in the report.”

The Middle States Commission team will be returning to Le Moyne April 3rd and 4th to review the way that this assessment has been conducted. These auditors will look at the work that has been done, seeing what contributions have been made to the school since the warning has been issued.