• One baccalaureate degree that requires at least 120 semester credit hours (Natural History & Humanities 133 hours).



• In addition, the Honors College has received university governing board approval for a second degree, with approval pending before the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, requiring 133 hours.)

• Honors holistic advisement every fall and spring semester for every Honors student, plus assistance to non-Honors students taking Honors courses or working with any Honors program. (Holistic advisement includes both advisement for course selection, as well as advisement related to international study opportunities, volunteer and service opportunities, competitive scholarship and fellowships, extracurricular activities, and personal assistance.)



• Honors First-Year Experience program for all incoming Honors freshmen (see http://www.honr.ttu.edu/FYE/fye2004.htm)



• Honors Computer lab with 6 workstations.



• HON, the Honors student organization, is supported both financially and through staff advising assistance.



• The Next One literary and artistic journal is supported both financially and through staff advising assistance.

• The Dean reports to the Provost and is evaluated annually.



• All administrative staff of the college report to and are evaluated annually by the Associate Dean or Dean as appropriate.

The institution identifies expected outcomes for its educational programs and its
administrative and educational support services; assesses whether it achieves these
outcomes; and provides evidence of improvement based on analysis of those results.

• Each of the academic degree programs has expected outcomes and assessments, as outlined in Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board materials submitted with both the Natural History & Humanities degree and Honors Arts and Letters degree (approved in December 2003 by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board). This documentation is also on file with the Honors Associate Dean (MM 202).





• Assessments of all goals of the Honors College Strategic Plan are articulated alongside the goals. See http://www.honr.ttu.edu/strategicplan/.
  
   

• Expected outcome of student participation in the Honors experience: 
  
  Students participating in the Honors experience will have an enriched university experience through Honors academic and co-curricular offerings. 

Assessments: 

1. Student course evaluations
    

2. Student program evaluations
    

3. Academic awards and achievements of students/Other notable awards and achievements of students, including future plans of Honors graduates
    

4. Graduation rates
    

Summary of assessments: 

1.      Honors-specific course evaluations are administered for every Honors-section course (small courses, limited to no more than 25 students, taught by tenured or tenure-track faculty), in addition to the generally administered university evaluation instrument.  These evaluations are examined every semester by Honors administrators for potential problems, exceptional successes, and other feedback.  Copies of the evaluations, including the open-ended comments, are provided to each faculty member to assist in his/her personal assessment of the course.  Courses in which the evaluations indicate problems are discussed by Honors administration and appropriate steps are taken to investigate and address possible problems.  All course evaluations are cataloged by semester and instructor and are available in McClellan Hall, room 112. 

2.      Student evaluations of particular programs are also administered.   

First-Year Experience.  One area in which evaluations are administered is the Honors First-Year Experience program.  Each FYE course is evaluated via the Honors-specific instrument and the general university instrument, and each FYE Learning Community Group and its mentors are evaluated on a separate instrument.  These data are qualitative in nature and do not lend themselves to summary in this report’s format.  However, these data are used to modify the program:  Evaluations for the first year of the program, for example, indicated that students did not fully understand the purpose of the program, so the curriculum was modified significantly to communicate this information more fully.  The hard copies of these evaluations are available in McClellan Hall room 102A from FYE Coordinator Uyen Tran.  In addition to these evaluations, the FYE students’ attitudinal orientations are evaluated through a series of specially designed questions that are administered as part of the CIRP, the standardized freshman evaluation instrument of the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at UCLA that is administered yearly at Texas Tech.  These data are being used to compile a profile of the current Honors student, which will assist us further in creating and modifying programs according to our students’ needs.  Full CIRP data are available from Dr. Sandra Marquez-Hall in room 201 of the Student Union.           

Honors Advisement.  All Honors students are required to be advised each semester, and each student is asked to complete a data sheet that provides qualitative feedback to Honors advisors about the student’s concerns for the advisement session, the student’s academic and co-curricular goals, the student’s activities, and any concerns the student has, especially those related to Honors.  These data sheets are compiled every semester and particular data are entered into a database.  The hard copy forms themselves are available in room 112 McClellan Hall, with each form ultimately being filed in the individual student’s Honors folder after data are entered into the database.  The data gathered enable advisors to meet the needs of each individual student while also providing a comprehensive set of information about our students.   

Undergraduate Research Fellowship.  The Honors Undergraduate Research Fellowship Program requests that both its faculty mentors and student mentees complete evaluations of their experiences at the end of both fall and spring semesters.  These evaluations enable the URF coordinator to pair students and faculty better, to facilitate communication, and to understand what parts of the program need improvement and make appropriate changes.  Hard copies of the evaluations are available in McClellan Hall room 108 with URF coordinator Kathy Lindsey.     

3.      Another way that enrichment is assessed is through monitoring the awards and achievements of Honors students.  Most prominently, the competitive and prestigious national and international scholarships and fellowships indicate that Texas Tech students’ experiences are enriched by the Honors experience.  Since 1994, Texas Tech undergraduates have won 23 Goldwater awards, with 4 additional Honorable Mention awards.  Texas Tech undergraduates have also earned a Truman Scholarship, a Gates Cambridge Scholarship, a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, and a Phi Kappa Phi Graduate Fellowship.  One undergraduate has earned a Udall Honorable Mention, and several additional students have been named finalists in the Truman competition and regional finalists in the Rhodes and Marshall competitions.  Each semester, the future plans of Honors graduates are gathered.  Data from May 2004 indicate that of those graduates reporting future plans, more than 60% will seek graduate, medical, law, or other professional education (3.85% law, 35.89% graduate, and 20.51% medical/dental).    

4.      Graduation rates.  It is a strong desire of the Honors College to track its students’ graduation rates.  Unfortunately, the current structure of the university’s mainframe system does not support this because the “flag” created many years ago to identify Honors students was created in such a way that past participants could not be tracked, including graduates of the program.  The Honors College submitted requests to alter this programming, and these requests are being addressed.  Graduation rates, however, for past semesters have had to be done completely by hand, and with an enrollment of nearly 1,000 students, this has proven to be a significant burden.  Evaluation of the Fall 1998 cohort’s graduation rate in Spring 2004 revealed that 81.3% of students were either Tech alum/graduates or were still currently affiliated with the university. 
  

• Expected educational outcomes of student participation in the Natural History and Humanities (NHH) degree program as outlined in degree proposal materials provided to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board:

• To provide a broadly based, liberal arts degree program with the hallmarks of an Honors experience, including the opportunity to explore relationships between disciplines and an emphasis on the development of critical thinking and communication skills in a small classroom environment.
   

• To provide a unique set of curricular opportunities that will enable a student to gain a working knowledge of the natural sciences, the humanities and/or the arts, and the relationships between the epistemologies in these disciplines.  The knowledge and skills (e.g., critical thinking skills, fieldwork skills, and artistic/creative application skills) gained through this curriculum will enable students to pursue a number of paths, including graduate work in areas such as museum science or technical communication, and, perhaps most uniquely, the role of “interpreter of science” to the public, especially when such interpretation is accomplished through a creative endeavor, in a number of venues.