Connecticut State University (WestConn) is currently working on its plan for accreditation, which is due in Dec 2012.
The New England Association of Schools and Colleges currently accredits WestConn as a whole, but the Ancell School of Business has yet to be accredited as a business school. In a school’s accreditation plan, there must be 21 standards met. According to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), these standards fall under three different sections: strategic planning, participants and assessment. All of the standards are based around the business school’s mission statement. A new mission statement was approved on Sept. 28.
“The accreditation plan says that: here are the 21 standards, here’s where we are, here’s where we need to be, and the difference is called a gap, and what you have to say is, ‘what are the actual steps that I take to fill that gap,’” said Allen Morton, dean of the Ancell School of Business.
The plan must define what teachers in the program are academically qualified (AQ), which are professionally qualified (PQ), and what makes teachers participating or supporting members of the faculty.
“The faculty voted a couple of years ago to proceed with accreditation, so in voting to proceed with it, the faculty developed a set of standards of what it meant to be AQ and what it meant to be PQ. So for AQ, for example, there are a couple ways of satisfying it. One way to do it if you’re AQ for undergraduate teaching is to publish two papers over a five-year time period, for graduate teaching, three publications over a five-year time period,” said Morton. “It’s really about keeping current in your field.”
The plan has been in its preliminary stages this semester.
“We have not mapped them all out entirely. We have three committees that match the groups that I mentioned: strategic planning, participants, assessment. The committees have spent the semester developing their preliminary analysis. They haven’t sat down yet and decided which standards we have and have not met yet. They’re going to do that early next semester,” said Morton.
The school also has a mentor assigned by the AACSB, who is another professor from an accredited school. The school has been doing standardized testing in recent weeks, administered by the Educational Testing Service (ETS), to see what the students are learning in comparison to the school’s desired level for accreditation.
“It’s really measuring your performance against predetermined objectives. So the first semester was set laying the groundwork, surveying the professors (Where do you teach this?), doing preliminary tests based on ETS (What do students know?), and matching what they know versus where things are taught, and if there is a mismatch, how do you fix it?” said Morton. “We’ll look at test results early next semester to see where we are in regards to assessment.”
The Ancell School of Business filed an application for accreditation in Aug 2009. The application was accepted by the AACSB in Sept 2009. Dean Morton believes that, with accreditation by the AACSB, business students at WestConn will be able to succeed better in the current economic situation.
“Accreditation says that you are meeting the standards with some of the best business schools in the country, and that’s what our objective is. And what it does is it helps students, when they graduate, to say, ‘I went to an accredited school,’” said Morton. “In this economy, you have to be as competitive as you possibly can.”
- Drew Mazur
Staff Writer
What about all the people that they duped in years past? Those people are armed with degrees from a school with no accreditation that they likely paid over $50,000 for. S***, I can print out pieces of paper and sell them to you for $50,000 also…and you won’t even have to go to class!