Learning Objective III

Graduates will have excellent oral as well as written communication skills.

The CS Department designed and implemented Course Direct Measures (CDMs) in Fall 2012 to be assessment points most closely associated with student outcomes required by ABET accreditation or learning objectives of a course.

All CS 5000-level or above courses requiring a class project, exam, assignment, or quiz that involved either writing a report or making a presentation for any semester from Fall 2021 - Fall 2024 were asked to evaluate the graduate students' communication skills. Instructors generated a CDM by providing an assessment of the class performance for the associated PLO (e.g., graduate student communication skills) based on the level of attainment using the following 5-point scale:

1. Student fails to demonstrate understanding of concepts required for communication skills
2. Student fails to meet minimum criteria for success for communication skills
3. Student barely meets minimum criteria for success for communication skills
4. Student clearly demonstrates evidence of success for communication skills
5. Student exhibits outstanding performance for communication skills

This assessment was generally based on targeted assignments, quizzes, or course project performances, although depending on the specific class, instructors took additional data into consideration.

We tried to ensure that a sufficient number of courses were chosen in each semester to provide adequate assessment of graduate students' communication skills.

Instructors were also required to include the sample of performance indicators that demonstrate the accuracy of the assessment. The samples of student work that demonstrate the accuracy of the assessment score can be provided upon request.

A satisfactory level of attainment is that 80% of graduate students score 3 or higher on the 1-5 scale.

A sample template of a CDM to evaluate graduate student communication skills is shown below.

The CDM Evaluation scores table presents a summary of the numerical component of the assessment results in terms of the CDM evaluation scores for graduate student communication skills for 13 courses offered in the past four years from Fall 2021 to Fall 2024.

Each number in the table is a fraction number, where the numerator denotes the number of graduate students who scored 3 or higher on a scale of 1-5 and the denominator denotes the total number of graduate students.  These evaluation scores correspond to the average percentage of graduate students above the expected attainment (i.e., scoring 3 or higher on a scale of 1-5).

This table demonstrates that since Fall of 2021, 8 out of 13 (i.e., 61.54%) courses have over 80% of graduate students scoring 3 or higher on a scale of 1-5.