The AWP Director's Handbook

A Publication of The Association of Writers & Writing Programs 2008

The Director's Handbook (713KB)

AWP Assessments

Introduction: Hallmarks of a Successful Program

The Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) is an association of 465 colleges and universities in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. AWP has established criteria for the evaluation of programs in order to promote excellence in the teaching of writing. These hallmarks, one set for graduate programs and another set for undergraduate programs, may be found at AWP’s Web site, www.awpwriter.org. The hallmarks also appear in The AWP Program Director’s Handbook, a PDF publication. AWP recommends that a creative writing program use these hallmarks periodically to conduct internal reviews.

AWP also conducts assessments of creative writing programs with the following objectives in mind:

• to provide a program with an unbiased, objective, and comprehensive external review;
• to catalog strengths and weaknesses in teaching and administration;
• to verify whether or not the institution has adequate resources to offer a degree in creative writing;
• to make recommendations on how to improve each major component of the program;
• to help administrators do their jobs more effectively.

AWP is aware that each institution has limited resources. An AWP assessment is designed to enable the university’s leadership to decide whether or not a program merits additional investment and to determine what prerequisites must be met for each new allocation of support. AWP assessments are designed to enable a department chair or Program Director to catalog the successes and needs of their program, so that he or she may develop a timeline for what the program must achieve to earn additional support from its dean, provost, or president.

The goal of an AWP assessment is to help a program provide its students with the best possible education in the art of writing. The welfare of the students is at the heart of the assessment team’s concerns.

AWP has conducted assessments of the programs at Northern Michigan University, the University of Georgia, Miami University, and the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. The provost of the University of Georgia wrote to the director of the program there that, “This is one of the most comprehensive, thorough and valuable reports I have seen developed by an outside organization. I am impressed by their effort, valuable comments and specific recommendations.”

Methods & Procedures

An AWP assessment evaluates every aspect of your program.

The Professional Standards Committee (five members of AWP’s board) and two to four additional academic professionals comprise the assessment team. The committee selects two to four people (depending on the size of the program) to serve as the on-site evaluators of your program.

The committee selects on-site evaluators who have a keen understanding of creative writing curriculum, program development, pedagogy, and issues related to the hiring, promotion, and retention of faculty. AWP board members, experienced Program Directors, and the Executive Director of AWP are among those who typically serve on such a team.

If AWP were engaged to assess your program, the team would examine CVs of the literature and creative writing faculty, department policies and handbooks, university catalogs, other publications of the program, and your program’s written responses to the team’s initial inquiries. After the examination of all this information, the team would visit the campus for three days to do the following:

a) interview faculty members of the program;
b) interview students;
c) meet with the chair, directors, and other departmental officers;
d) visit and speak with the committees that attend to the writing program;
e) attend classes;
f) speak with the dean who oversees your college or division;
g) tour the facilities, including the library;
h) evaluate sample theses.

Below are some of the initial requests for information that the team typically makes of the program before its visit:

1. Please set up the appropriate appointments and meetings to make the interviews possible.
2. Please send a list, by title, genre, and author, of all theses conferred in the past three years, so we may randomly pick a few for review.
3. Provide that part of your department’s mission statement that deals with graduate education and research. Supplement your statement with specific goals and strategies as they pertain to the topic at hand, as suggested by the outline below.

   Mission:

   Degrees Offered:

   Narrative on Program’s Philosophy or Pedagogy:

   Specific Goals and Strategies:

   a. Admission (requirements & procedures)
   b. Completion requirements
   c. Graduate curriculum (append both listing of course offerings and narrative descriptions as they appear in the catalog)
   d. Graduate instruction (all matters relating to the academic relationship between students and faculty).

4. Provide, in tabular form, the number of students (a) enrolled for the fall semester only and (b) graduating for each year the program has been authorized. Note: for graduation data, total all students receiving degrees in Summer, Fall, and Spring graduations. Also, please give your best estimate for projected enrollments for the next five years.
5. Characterize the graduate students in your department (i.e., percentage who earned undergraduate degrees at your institution, percentage from other in-state institutions, percentage from out-of-state institutions, and percentage of foreign students). Include statistics for GPA and, if relevant, GRE or another national exam.
6. Describe the ways you recruit students and indicate how successful those methods have been.
7. Describe the process and criteria by which you select students for admission.
8. Provide, in tabular form, the number of applicants and the numbers of students admitted to your program for the past three years.
9. Describe the strengths of your graduate program. What are you doing to maintain and improve these?
10. Excluding facilities, describe the weaknesses of your graduate program. What are you doing to remedy these?
11. In realistic terms, discuss those facilities, at hand or needed, that are crucial to the success of your program. Does the physical plant adequately support your academic program?
12. Describe the adequacy or needs of your library holdings in terms of graduate education in your discipline.
13. Describe the climate for research and/or creative work on your campus and in your department. How is this reflected by concrete actions, programs, policies, etc.?
14. Rate the morale among (a) faculty, (b) graduate students, and (c) undergraduate minors and majors.
15. Do you use Teaching Assistants? If so, please indicate:

    (a) what ratio of graduate students are TAs,
    (b) the dollar amount of a nine-month TA,
    (c) the duties assigned to TAs,
    (d) the training your department provides TAs, and
    (e) your comparative assessment of how competitive your TA package is with those of comparable institutions in your region.

16. Does your department use Research Assistants? If so, please answer (a) through (e) above for RAs.
17. Do you foresee important changes in enrollments, faculty, employment, etc., in the next ten years that will influence graduate education in your department? If so, please explain how you are planning to accommodate such changes.
18. Please comment on any topic you wish to address in relation to graduate education in your department.
19. Indicate the number of faculty in your department in each of the following categories, again in tabular form, for the fall semester of each year your program has been authorized: full-time faculty; all faculty holding terminal degrees; all faculty directing graduate students.
20. Does the range of specialty fields represented by your current faculty adequately meet your needs in terms of graduate education? Explain.
21. Please list and attach a CV for each member of your graduate faculty; clearly indicate: (a) which are tenure-track and (b) which are visitors.
    Each CV should indicate relevant publications with complete bibliographic data and all other relevant professional credentials. Either on the c.v.s or as a separate addendum, please indicate the number of student theses directed by each member of the graduate faculty.
22. Please enclose four copies of two recent departmental or program newsletters.
23. Describe any fundraising that has been done for the program.

Once the assessment team has finished a draft of the report, it is presented to the Program Director so that he or she may correct errors in fact-finding or in the interpretation of information.

While the Program Director is reviewing the draft, it is also reviewed by the AWP Board of Directors for fairness and thoroughness. After the board’s approval of the report, AWP will send your program ten bound copies, one loose-leaf copy, and a PDF file of the report. As a courtesy, we will send copies directly to the university officials who meet with members of the team. As long as your program provides the team with all the necessary information in a timely fashion, you can expect the final report six weeks after the team’s visit to your campus.

Fees & Expenses

AWP’s fee for assessments ranges from $4,000 to $5,500, depending on the size of the program, requested focus of the report (undergraduate study, graduate study, or both), and the number of genres which the program teaches and accepts for thesis work.

Your institution will pay for the team’s travel, accommodations, and meals at which you or members of your faculty or administration are present. AWP pays for the team’s incidental expenses, the team’s honoraria, and the office expenses for the production of the final report.

When to Schedule an AWP Assessment

Because an AWP assessment would require a significant investment of time, effort, and money from your institution, you should not schedule an AWP assessment unless your program is truly eager for advancement and wishes to find the best possible evaluations and recommendations to facilitate that advancement. If you and your institution’s leadership are content with your program’s current operations, if you merely wish to fulfill the periodic reporting requirements of your university, or if you merely need a perfunctory report to provide information to your regional agency for accreditation, it may be better for your program to hire its own evaluators as per the guidelines established by your institution.

AWP’s assessments are most useful when you and your program are ready to implement changes and develop a four-year plan to improve your program.

If your program meets two or more of the conditions below, it is likely that an AWP Assessment would benefit your program. We recommend that you schedule an AWP assessment

• when your program has stability in leadership. (AWP’s assessments will provide a roadmap for a program’s progress, so it is crucial that the program have a talented director who is eager to act upon the assessment and provide the continuity to execute a three or four-year plan.)
• when your program has conducted at least one internal review. (Often a program is content when it should be trying harder; an internal review often helps to form an awareness of how a program compares to its peers; an internal review helps to develop a receptiveness to the need for change.)
• when a majority of your colleagues are eager for changes and improvements in your program but you and your colleagues remain uncertain about the exact needs, strategies, and priorities.
• when the department wishes to change its Masters of Arts (MA) degree program to a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree program.
• when the college or university has begun strategic planning—targeting the  creative writing program for development towards national eminence.
• when a program has been in operation for three or more years.
• when the program has the support of its department chair, dean, or other university leaders and they need to verify the components of your program that merit additional support.

Please contact the Executive Director of AWP if you would like to schedule an assessment of your program, or if you would like help in determining whether of not your program is ready for an assessment. (703) 993-4301.

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Friends of AWP

Why Should I Support AWP?

A Brief History of AWP

Undergraduate Hallmarks

Graduate Hallmarks

Members of AWP are invited to read the Associatiation of Writers & Writing Programs Strategic Plan 2000 - 2010. This document details the goals, objectives, and strategies that the association will pursue throughout this decade. The complete Strategic Plan is available as a downloadable file in Portable Document Format (PDF).

2000-2010 Strategic Plan

Annual Report 2007

Annual Report 2003

If you are a member of AWP, the AWP Board of Directors encourages you to send your comments on the Strategic Plan. Write to services@awpwriter.org or to any board or staff member of AWP.