Which
claims are important to TEAC?
The public and the schools are largely concerned with the status
of the program’s graduates. They want to know whether the
graduates are competent, caring, and qualified. TEAC wants to know
this as well, but for a different reason: TEAC uses the information
to judge the quality of the program.
The institution and the program faculty, on the
other hand, may be more interested in knowing which attributes of
the program contributed to the graduates’ competence. Those
who enrolled in the program and those who paid tuition and funded
scholarships might also have a keen interest in whether any value
was added by the program and whether the students showed growth
and development over the course of the program. Indeed, in communicating
with the public, the program faculty and institution undoubtedly
make ambitious claims about the effectiveness of the program and
the value that is added from the college experience.
However, TEAC’s responsibility as an accreditor
is to assure the public that the program meets the standards, which
is served by the program’s evidence of its graduates’
competence. This evidence is quite apart from how the competence
was acquired and to what, exactly, it might be attributed.
Return to Claims and Rationale
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