2003-2004 Yearly Program Assessment Report For

2004-2005 Yearly Program Assessment report for the Chemistry Department Undergraduate Program.

I. Assessment Activities:

A. Program Goals

1. The program seeks to provide a high quality education for both our major and non- major students. This is our singular goal as educators.

2. Learning Outcomes/Data Collection.

a. Final Exams in General Chemistry The Department of Chemistry is committed to gradually increasing the tools used to follow the progress of students through our programs. We are focusing attention on the freshman and sophomore years, because the largest attrition rates of our majors occur within these years. Toward that end, the department uses a final exam in General Chemistry which does not change substantially from year to year. This allows us to monitor student learning longitudinally. We believe its addition will aid the department in monitoring student progress through the curricula.

b. Standardized American Chemical Society Exam in Organic Chemistry The department of chemistry uses this mathematically objective in which student scores are compared against national norms. At the end of their second semester of organic chemistry (typically the Spring semester of the sophomore year) a national exam written by the American Chemical Society (ACS) is given. We plan to use this tool in conjunction with the Freshman Chemistry Scores (Section a., above) to further investigate and improve retention through this critical portion of our curricula.

c. The department bases its success, in part, on its ability to successfully prepare its graduates to pursue employment or further their education. It is difficult to keep track of every graduating senior once they leave campus, but we generally are able to track 80-90% of them.

d. The fourth measure of our success lies in the number of students whose research (e.g. Capstone) is presented to the chemical community. In chemistry, the following methods are standard for dissemination of research: (i) having a research paper published in a peer reviewed national or international journal (ii) presenting a paper at a national meeting of the American Chemical Society or (iii) presenting a paper at a regional or local meeting of the ACS. Because of the natural time lag associated with the publication if research in journals, students from earlier years will be carried over into this year and those from this year will appear in later years. e. Distribution of Majors One of the reasons we recently introduced majors in Biochemistry and Forensics was to attract more students into chemistry. Thus it is important that we begin to track the distribution of majors within the degree programs.

Note: It is difficult to comply with Board of Trustee Initiative 3 because there is no national standard measure available for students graduating with an undergraduate degree in chemistry. The only quantitative data available is the GPA of the graduate. This value can be normalized using a student’s composite ACT score when they enter our program. We will make an effort to obtain similar data from other schools or obtain a national standard to which we will compare our students. A simple ratio of ACT score to final GPA would provide a numerical value for comparison. The collection of data for annual reports will primarily consist of results from exit surveys and normalized GPAs.

3. Results

a. General Chemistry Final Exams This is the first year in which we are including data from the CHM 211 and 212 final exams. Complete final exam data is available starting from Fall 2002, and is presented in Tables 1 and 2.

Table 1. CHM Table 2. CHM 211 212 Score Fall Fall Fall Score Spring Spring Spring 2002 2003 2004 2003 2004 2005 90+ 3.0% 3.4% 4.4% 90+ 5.3% 7.4% 4.7% 80 10% 6.8% 20.8% 80 25.1% 21.3% 13.5% 70 23% 14.4% 27.8% 70 24.5% 22.8% 23.3% 60 20% 31.3% 19.0% 60 17.1% 29.7% 32.6% 0- 50 43.8% 44.1% 30.8% 50- 27.8% 18.9% 25.9% N 331 236 321 N 187 202 193 Mean 64 60 70 Mean 67 68 64

We need to develop ways to improve student retention through those critical first 2 years our students are in the program. While the data needs to be correlated with scores from CHM 355 and 356 in the hopes that it will point to ideas by which rates may be improved (See Development of New Assessment Tools Section, below). The final exam averages are fairly constant through the period, suggesting that the difficulty level of the exams are consistent (between 60 and 70%), and are relatively independent of the group of instructors teaching the courses. The data set is too small to draw any meaningful conclusions. b. Results of ACS exam in Organic Chemistry:

This year, 45% of 120 students taking the final exam in CHM 356 during the 2004-2005 academic year made above the 50th percentile. Seven percent were above the 90th percentile, and 14% above the 75th percentile. Our overall mean and median scores were at the 49th and 48th percentile, respectively. The mean represents an improvement over last year’s value of 39% One of the problems we have in organic chemistry in general is that a significant number of students do not receive at least a grade of C in organic chemistry I (CHM 355). This number may be as high as 40% in a given year. Often these students then repeat CHM 355 several times. In the spring semester these multiple repeaters may account for as much as 20% of the students in the course. In an attempt to lower the number of multiple repeaters, we have instituted a course, which ran in this period of reporting, as a special topics course, and currently attainted full course staus as CHM 254. This course is aimed toward helping weaker students in CHM 355. Student performance on the ACS standardized exam will be one tool by which the success of both CHM 355 and CHM 356 can be judged.

c. Results of Tracking Graduates.

We find no other tool as useful in our assessment of the department as is following our students in the first 6 months following their graduation. Table 3 summarizes the results for the previous academic year. The total number of graduates for the year was 29. This number is a significant improvement over last year (17 graduates). The improvement seems to be related to our introduction of 2 new majors (see below Table 3 Number of students Percent of students Seniors Graduating in 2004-2005 29 100% Admitted to Ph. D. programs 2 6.9% Admitted to pharmacy, medical, 7 24.1% veterinary or law school Admitted to Master’s in 3 10.3% Forensics Admitted to Other Master’s 2 6.9% programs Admitted to the Chemistry 3 10.3% Departments Master’s program Additional Education 1 3.4% Industrial employment 1 3.4% Attempting Admission to 3 10.3% Medical School High School Teaching 2 6.9% Unknown 5 17.0% Section e. Distribution of Majors) During this year, we saw 67% of the students we were able to track, either attend professional school, or go on to graduate work in the field. The number is lower than last year, partly because of the influence of the forensics degree attracting 10% of our graduates into Masters’ programs in forensics. Eight percent of students were admitted to Ph.D programs in chemistry.

d. Results from Research Productivity of Seniors. (Need to do this section)

Table 4. Number of students

Student co-authors in journal papers 0 Student presenters at national meetings 1

Student presenters at regional meetings 0

Students presenters at local or state meetings 8 Students co-authoring posters/papers at 3 national meeting (not presenting) The department believes student presentations and publications to be an important measure of its success. The University now requires a Capstone experience from all graduating seniors. It would be easy to develop “busy work” projects for them. Thus, the number of presentations and publications are a measure of the quality of both a student’s achievement and the quality of the research in the department. Furthermore, peer pressure ensures that research which is presented at a meeting of faculty peers be novel and of high quality. We are extremely proud to have a total of 12 undergraduates appearing on technical presentations this year. These include 8 students presenting their own work, 3 of which presented at National meeting of the ACS, where they meet students and professionals from all over the country. Presenting at meetings, gives students an opportunity to see that their hard work will be recognized. It also hones their ability to answer technical questions concerning their work, which is an extremely valuable skill when interviewing for employment. e. Distribution of Majors. In an attempt to increase the number of graduates with degrees in chemistry, we now offer majors in biochemistry and forensic chemistry. Last year we had one graduate in biochemistry, this year we increased to 10. In addition we also added 3 forensic majors. It appears that the increase in majors is largely due to the increase of students in these programs. We are guardedly optimistic that the growth in these majors will continue, and have a positive influence on the number of majors. This preliminary data is however highly promising and quite encouraging. Table 5 Major 2003- 2004- 2004 2005 SC10 13 12 SC20 4 4 SC50 --- 3 (Forensics) SC60 --- 10 (Biochem) Total 17 29

Plans for the current year: 1. Student performance through their sophomore year needs more attention. Retention rates need to be measured more precisely. The hope is that the trends will point to solutions in the curricula which may increase retention rates. We need to begin tracking student grades through these courses in addition to final exam scores.

2. Final Exam Scores for CHM 356 need to be analyzed and combined with the Results of the 211, 212 and 356 Final Exam Scores.

3. We are in process of revising our evaluation methods concerning the Senior capstone presentations. Since we treat the Capstone as the culmination of a students performance throughout the curricula, the quality of the project, the required paper and the presentation are an excellent tool by which the quality of a student can be assessed. Data needs to be collected and analyzed from every graduate.

4. Overall Program Review. This is a longer term project we began last year. We are currently focusing on methods which may make our ACS Major (SC50) more attractive to students.

4. Assistance Needed: In last years assessment report we estimated that the growth in majors would increase 25% due to the introduction of the 2 new degree programs. In fact we saw a growth of 41%, we will need a faculty member to act as a program director for the forensics chemistry program, which is required for full accreditation.

5. What one most important thing has the department/program learned through this process?