The Department of Family and Consumer Sciences will graduate Fashion Merchandising students who perform well in positions of employment within the fashion industry.

The student will demonstrate professional competence and the ability to apply what they have learned (e.g., appropriate product knowledge, knowledge of business procedures, knowledge of industry systems) in various aspects of fashion merchandising.

The supervisor evaluation form for fashion merchandising interns evaluates three skill areas (personal skills, interpersonal skills, and professional characteristics including appropriate use of knowledge from the program content). Both questions from this form that are used as indicators are overall supervisor ratings of the intern. One of them rates the interns on a Likert-type scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being the lowest rating and 5 being the highest rating. The other is a "yes-no" indicator of whether the employer would hire the intern in the company for an entry-level management position. Internship is a requirement for degree completion in this program, so all fashion merchandising students are evaluated in this way. The instrument, which includes the supervisor rating of the intern that will be extracted and reported, was developed by the department faculty as a whole. Instruments used by other family and consumer sciences/fashion merchandising colleges and departments were reviewed in the development of the instrument. The attached instrument was designed to be generic for all programs in the Department of Family and Consumer Sciences that require this type of internship and is published in the Internship Handbook which serves as the textbook for the internship course (FACS 4369). The other programs that use this same form are interior design, general family and consumer sciences (without a teaching certificate), and food service management.

At least 80% of business supervisors of fashion merchandising interns will give the intern a rating of 3.5 or higher on a 5.0 scale and 80% of business supervisors will indicate that they would hire the intern given the availability of a suitable entry-level management position in the company.

There were 17 Fashion Merchandising graduates for the 2014-2015 assessment cycle.  Of these students, 13 (76%) received ratings of 4 or 5, whereas 4 (24%) received ratings of 3 or 2.  Therefore, this criterion was not met.

For the 17 Fashion Merchandising graduates for the 2014-2015 assessment cycle, 15 of business supervisors (88%) indicated that they would hire the intern for their company if a suitable opening existed.  Therefore, this criterion was met.

Overall, business supervisors are satisfied with the quality of the Fashion Merchandising students who intern with them.  Two of the three business supervisors who assigned ratings of "3" actually did hire the interns for entry-management positions, illustrating that the rating of "3" ("Good") indicates satisfactory performance.  Perhaps the most appropriate action for this goal and its accompanying objective would be to change the criterion level to "3.0 or better" rather than "3.5 or better."  

The Department of Family and Consumer Sciences will graduate Fashion Merchandising majors who have an in-depth knowledge of the content area of the major.

Students graduating from the fashion merchandising program will demonstrate the knowledge and skills necessary for entry-level management in fashion retailing/merchandising positions.

For quite a few years, Fashion Merchandising students completed an Exit Survey consisting of demographic data, professional goals, and a series of multiple choice and short-answer questions, all designed to determine whether the student had retained information from the courses over the four-year fashion merchandising program.  However, the department had decided that this survey did not discriminate well and therefore a rubric was designed that could be applied to internship logs with the goal of determining what students had retained from their course work and used during the internship experience.

Based on a rubric developed in-house, 90% of Fashion Merchandising graduates will score a grade of High Pass, Pass, or Low Pass on an analysis of their internship logs designed to determine student knowledge and skills.

100% of Fashion Merchandising graduates scored a grade of High Pass (2/17 or 12%), Pass (10/17 or 59%), or Low Pass (5/17 or 29%) using the rubric developed for the analysis of internship logs.  Therefore, this criterion was met.

Although the department was seeking a better way to collect data to determine whether students retained content-area knowledge and skills over the course of the program, the method developed was not particularly satisfactory.  To begin with, it was hoped that only three weeks' worth of logs would be adequate for review for the analysis, but that small sample of logs was woefully inadequate.  The department needs to regroup and decide how to handle the assessment from this time forward.  The search for a satisfactory method of assessing this objective needs to continue.