What is a typical assessment process?

Each academic faculty will want to develop a process that best fits its context, but assessment is most clearly viewed as a cycle:

1. Determine the goals or student learning objectives for the program, and/or determine what the key questions are that you have about your students and how well they are learning what you are trying to teach them.
2. Decide upon the methods to assess those.
3. Assess the goals or learning objectives.
4. Discuss the results, determining whether any of the curriculum content, courses, or pedagogy needs to be changed.
5. Implement the changes. At this point, you might also change some of the goals or the methods used to assess the program.
6. Assess the revised curriculum.
7. Discuss the results of the assessment.
8. ... and so forth.