Annual Program Assessment Report - AAS: Business
Prepared by Dr. Margareta Knopik | 406/683-7205 | m_knopik@umwestern.edu

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Annual Program Summary Report, AY 2006-07
AAS: Business
Submitted by: Dr. Margareta Knopik

During the 2006-2007 academic year much of the departmental focus has been on the curricular changes being made to the bachelor degree. Assessment collection was delayed for all degrees offered by the business and technology department as faculty discussed quality control issues and data collection. However, even though degree-specific data was not collected for the AAS degree in business, there are some issues we are able to extrapolate from information derived from the data collected for the bachelor degree in business.

For example, employers and internship supervisors expressed some dissatisfaction with students’ abilities to apply discipline-specific knowledge, especially in the quantitative areas of accounting, finance and statistics. This would, in all likelihood, apply to AAS graduates, as well, since they are not required to take as many courses in accounting and no finance courses at all. There also appears to be some weakness in problem solving—especially when faced with ethical issues. This is of major concern to the faculty and when the ethics course was removed from the business core for the academic year beginning fall 2007 it was with the understanding that ethics would be embedded throughout the core curriculum and reflected in the syllabi for each of the core classes.

Communication, including the use of technology, appears to be satisfactory, although some of the employers and internship supervisors remarked that the projects should be more contemporary. This information was relayed to the relevant faculty members.

One AAS-specific change that was made was driven by the Board of Regents, as the degree was found to be out of compliance due to the large (six hours) number of electives. That situation was corrected for the academic year beginning fall 2007 by specifying business, computer, or economics electives only.