Planning and Assessment Council
The Planning and Assessment Council (PAC) reviews assessment processes at The Cooper Union and aids The Office of the President and the Vice President of Finance and Administration to monitor the effectiveness of strategic planning efforts. Its mission is to identify and use a systematic set of planning and assessment guidelines and metrics to strengthen strategic planning and decision making.
Among other functions its role is to:
To review a campus-wide assessment plan that conforms to the expected assessment standards, namely that activities are “useful, cost-effective, reasonably accurate and truthful, carefully planned, and organized, systematic and sustained.”
To better align assessment measures with stated student learning outcomes and loop closing activities.
To identify standardized surveys that produce helpful comparative data, to explore the systematic use of standard instruments, and to recommend further types of external benchmarking.
To monitor accountability for assessment activities and to produce a brief annual interpretative review that accompanies “scorecards” or dashboard reports of key performance indicators on the strategic plan. (To help in the identification of key performance indicators)
To create an annual assessment summary of the reports from each academic unit identifying particular aspects of a faculty's assessment performance.
To recommend the adoption of new technologies or software to lower the overhead costs of assessment and accreditation efforts.
Professor Davis has been a member of the Planning and Assessment Council since its creation in April, 2011 and became chair of the PAC in January, 2013. The current members of the PAC are:
- Peter Buckley, Associate Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences
- Melody Baglione, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering
- Gerardo del Cerro Santamaria, Director of Institutional Assessment
- Teresa Dahlberg, Chief Academic Officer
- Benjamin Davis (chair), Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering
- Day Gleeson, Associate Professor of Art
- Diana Agrest, Professor of Architecture