Exiting seniors should exhibit comprehensive knowledge of key concepts provided during their educational experience

The graduating senior comprehensive knowledge of core criminal justice course work will be evaluated through a senior exit exam. The exam will offer an opportunity to faculty to access where improvement might be needed.

All graduating seniors will be asked to take an exit exam that will provide faculty a means of assessing students' comprehension and retention on key concepts provided to them during their educational experience. A committee was created to decide the most effective mean of assessing undergraduate student outcomes. Working from course objectives, faculty input was requested to develop several questions for each objective. Faculty who had taught any of the six core courses in the previous five years were asked to submit two questions for each objective. Questions were reviewed and edited with specific criteria in mind. A sufficient context was provided in each question stem in order that the question could stand alone on the exam without the student having to know the class and objective source. Questions covered important areas of each field, not obscure issues. From this pool of over six hundred questions, a faculty sub-committee selected ten of the best indicators for each of the six core areas. A sixty question exam form was developed and placed on SHSU's Blackboard academic support system. Each semester graduating seniors are notified by e-mail and encouraged to take the exit exam prior to graduation. Test results are delivered to the CJ Undergrad Office at end of each semester.

The average score of graduating seniors will be at least 70%.

Each semester students have scored an average of 70 or above on the exit exam exhibiting a collective knowledge and comprehension of important areas within the field of Criminal Justice.

Criminal Justice and Criminology consists of several important component areas. We want to utilize the senior exit exam to indicate whether our students are obtaining knowledge in each of these areas and our previously desired student learning outcomes. Thus, we will examine important areas and change our curriculum/instruction accordingly if needed. For example, if our students seem to be lacking in knowledge of specific component areas (e.g., law enforcement, diversity, corrections, criminal law), we will make changes to increase their level of knowledge in those areas.

After review of the senior exit exam component areas, we determined that we wanted to provide the students with more comprehensive knowledge in several areas. Thus, with the help of an outside consultant and our senior exit exam results, we made significant changes to our undergraduate curriculum and instruction. Specifically, we determined that we want our students to leave our program with more knowledge in policing, corrections, diversity, research methods/statistics, and the ability to apply their knowledge in criminal justice settings. As such, we changed our core curriculum to include required courses in both policing and corrections, added a statistics course, created and added a diversity course, and created and added a capstone course that is entitled Problem Analysis in Criminal Justice. In this capstone course, our students will utilize their knowledge (e.g., theory, research methods) to answer current questions within the criminal justice field. For example, our students will demonstrate the ability to determine, from data, whether or not a particular agency has been engaging in racial profiling or needs more correctional officers to effectively run a prison. A curriculum committee made up of several of our faculty members presented these changes to our faculty, who subsequently voted to approve these changes. The changes were also approved by the Sam Houston State University Curriculum Committee. These new curriculum changes will be implemented over the next few academic years. We believe these changes will increase our desired student learning outcomes.

An item analysis will be generated each semester from test results data collected on BlackBoard. This analysis will focus on areas that as a college will point our efforts toward improvement. Modifications will be made to test questions identified from the analysis by faculty input. These modifications will be geared toward reducing poorly discriminating items and assessing areas in the curriculum that may need further development and/or instruction. Additionally, modifications will be made to questions as curriculum and new faculty are changed and added.

Writing and research skills increased

Students will demonstrate competence in their writing and research skills. Students will develop papers and posters that will be reviewed by a faculty committee or scholarly organization according to agreed upon methodology.

All undergraduate criminal justice students are invited to develop a scholarly research paper/poster proposal. Writing and research skills are judged by a faculty committee who provide feedback on their proposals and final papers/posters. Students are given specific guidelines developed by a faculty committee. These guidelines include areas of organization, content, quality of research, and writing. All papers are reviewed by one or more faculty committee members and judged according to these faculty developed guidelines. Once reviewed, papers/posters that meet the objectives set forth in the guidelines are accepted and progress to the next stage of expanding ideas. Those students displaying competence in guidelines are invited to present at a local, regional, or national conference where their papers will be peer reviewed.

At least 75% of students who submit proposals will display critical thinking and follow guidelines demonstrating valid statements backed by strong supportive evidence.

65% of students who submitted proposals (1.65% of our undergraduates)were selected by faculty committee using a rubric based on guidelines stated. These proposals were selected to be developed into a research paper or poster that could be presented at a local or national conference. These proposals exhibited the required elements to produce papers based on empirical evidence and scientific findings. After committee evaluation, the final papers were found to be well thought out and exhibited high-quality academic writing.

Presentation at our undergraduate conference, as well as regional and national conferences, consists of peer-reviewed feedback and editing of final product. Thus, we would like to see at least 2% (approximately 40) of our students presenting research papers/poster to conferences.

During the 2008/2009 academic year, 25 (approximately 1.25%) students presented their research paper/poster at our conference or a regional or national conference and received specific faculty feedback on their writing and research.

In order to further work on developing our students' writing and research skills, we will continue to offer an annual undergraduate conference and encourage more of our students' involvement by acquiring more faculty participation and mentoring of undergraduate students in their effort to present papers and posters. We will attempt to increase student participation in the next academic year which will produce more proposals for comprehensive review. Additionally, we will continue to provide personal feedback to students on their proposals and final papers and posters. This offers them one-on-one mentoring to develop their skills with a faculty member. We will also actively encourage and help undergraduates propose and present papers and posters at regional and national conferences. In the next academic year we hope to meet the criteria of 75% competence for those students who submit proposals.