| The
Accreditation Committee's decision process
The second concerns the accreditation decision
itself. The Accreditation Committee must decide whether the accreditation
report, which contains the Accreditation Panel’s recommendation,
is convincing and consistent with its own reading of the Brief,
the audit report, the staff analysis, any reports of the consultants,
any correspondence, TEAC’s Guidelines, and TEAC’s policies.
To modify the recommendations and findings of the accreditation
report, the Accreditation Committee must find evidence that falsifies
or contradicts the panel’s recommendation.
Certification
of TEAC procedures.
The Accreditation Committee determines whether the TEAC staff has
complied throughout the accreditation process with TEAC’s
policies and regulations by examining the documentation provided
by the staff for each stage of the accreditation process. If the
TEAC staff did not follow a policy, the committee would need to
determine if the error had a material effect on the accreditation
recommendation. If the program faculty was not given an opportunity
to respond, for example, to errors in the audit report (favorable
or unfavorable to the program) before it went to the Accreditation
Panel, the panel’s recommendation might have been different
from the one it submitted to the Accreditation Committee. On the
other hand, if the program faculty waived its right to the full
period it had in which to comment, the effect on the recommendation
might be negligible.
If the director of the Accreditation Panel made
no suggestions for audit tasks, as recommended in TEAC’s policy,
and the panel’s deliberations raised no additional issues
of verification, this departure from TEAC policy could be a matter
of no consequence.
If the panel’s deliberations, were frustrated
by the fact that some key pieces of evidence were not verified owing
to the auditors not receiving proper instructions, the committee
might conclude that the audit would need to be done again, or that
some other remedy should be found to compensate for the effects
of the staff’s error.
If the auditors strayed from the verification of
evidence into judgments about the meaning of the evidence in the
Brief (apart from the evidence about institutional commitment),
the committee would need to consider whether this auditors’
error interfered with the proper deliberations of the Accreditation
Panel.
It may be, to take a less problematic issue, that
some important elements of TEAC’s procedures cannot be documented
directly owing to the staff’s oversight, carelessness, inattention,
and so forth (e.g., there may not be a letter formally accepting
the Brief, panel minutes might be silent on the matter of a quorum,
or some dues or fees may not have been paid, etc.). Here again,
the committee will need to decide if the point is sufficiently important
to call into question the panel’s recommendation.
Occasionally there may be departures from TEAC’s
established policy that were driven by local exigencies. A conflict
of interest between the program and an auditor or panel member may
not have been declared in a timely manner or at all. The committee
would consider whether the existence of the conflict, or even the
appearance of the conflict, had compromised the auditors’
or panel members’ conclusions.
The auditors may have been unable to avoid, as
required in TEAC policies, occasions of “wining and dining”
while they were on the campus. Compromises in the procedures may
have been made over unavoidable changes in travel plans, flight
delays, and so forth. The committee would assure itself that these
compromises were of little consequence.
It is the responsibility of the Accreditation Committee
to probe the evidence the staff has assembled to verify that the
procedures followed in each case have the integrity required by
TEAC’s system. (Top)
Scrutiny of the accreditation report
The TEAC system is designed so that the Accreditation Committee
is able to easily accept the recommendations that the Accreditation
Panel makes in its accreditation report.
The method the committee uses to determine whether
it will accept or reject the panel’s recommendations is the
common method of falsification. If the committee cannot falsify
a panel recommendation, the committee must accept it because its
opposite cannot be supported with arguments or evidence in the record.
In this method, the committee considers each recommendation
in the accreditation report to see whether it can find some evidence
in the Brief, the audit report, the accreditation report itself,
or any other documentation about the case, that would undermine
a recommendation or finding in the accreditation report.
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For example, the panel may have recommended accreditation
but with the stipulation that the program must remedy its
weak evidence for the graduates’ subject matter knowledge.
The topic, in the panel’s judgment, may have been
overlooked, misconstrued, or the modes of assessment may
have been suspect with regard to their validity. The committee
would then seek to find evidence that would undermine or
falsify the panel’s conclusion. The committee, for
example, would look for persuasive evidence of the valid
assessment of subject matter, or a cogent rationale for
the assessment of subject matter that adequately reflected
the current state of scholarship about the subject matter.
If the committee found sufficient evidence to satisfy the Quality Principle I requirement that the program’s
graduates learn their subject matter, they would reject
the panel’s recommendation that accreditation be granted
with a stipulation. The stipulation would be removed from
the TEAC accreditation decision. However, if the committee
could find no evidence in the record that could undermine
or nullify the panel’s recommendation of a stipulation,
the committee would accept it, and the stipulation would
stand.
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To take another example, the panel may have recommended
provisional accreditation on the grounds that, while there
was sufficient evidence that the students had learned the
elements of Quality Principle I, the evidence was
inconclusive about Quality Principle III. The committee’s
approach on this point, as on all points, would be to seek
evidence that would disconfirm the panel’s conclusion.
The committee would examine the evidence about the internal
audit and Quality Principle III presented in the
Brief and in the audit report to see if it were sufficient
to support the program’s claim that it had in fact
satisfied Quality Principle III. To accept the
panel’s recommendation for provisional accreditation,
the committee, in other words, would need to satisfy itself
that there was insufficient evidence that the program’s
quality control system was effective.
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If the panel were to recommend preaccreditation or new
program accreditation on the strength of the program’s
rationale, quality control system, and the evidence of commitment,
the committee would examine the evidence, and seek evidence
that would show that the rationale was weak, or that the
internal audit, or the audit report, failed to confirm the
evidence about the quality control system, or that there
was persuasive evidence that the institution was not committed
to the program. Should the committee fail to find evidence
on these points, they would have to accept the panel's recommendation.
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The Accreditation Committee’s method is closely
connected to the panel’s method and is, in a sense, its mirror
image. The committee is attempting find sufficient and persuasive
evidence for the opposite of what the panel claimed. Thus, when
the panel rejects an alternative or rival explanation for a program
faculty’s claim about the quality principles and standards,
the committee seeks evidence that would enable it to accept the
rival explanation.
In a field like education, where the evidence is
rarely conclusive, greater weight is given by necessity to the panel’s
conclusions because of the difficulty in finding conclusive evidence
on any point that would rebut the panel’s determination.
The standard of evidence for the panel is somewhat
lower than is the standard for the committee in the sense that the
threshold for the panel’s recommendation is that the evidence
in the Brief be consistent with the program faculty’s claims,
while the standard for the committee is that the evidence against
the panel’s recommendation must be conclusive.
If the panel found that the program’s evidence
is consistent with the conclusion that the program’s graduates
learn their subject matter, the committee would have to base its
challenge to the panel’s recommendation on evidence that indicates
that the graduates do not know their subject matter, not weak evidence
for subject matter knowledge. (Top)
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