Our Preview All Course Expectations (PACE) system provides students and advisors with information about what will be expected of them in any 200-level-or-below course before registration. Instructors provide basic information about each section of each course they teach, alerting students to the knowledge and skills they expect students to bring into the course. PACE equips students to choose carefully those courses in which they are capable of success, and restrains the universal tendency for introductory courses to become “watered down” to accommodate the lack of preparation of the students who take them. Our Preview All Course Expectations (PACE) system provides students and advisors with information about what will be expected of them in any 200-level-or-below course before registration. Instructors provide basic information about each section of each course they teach, alerting students to the knowledge and skills they expect students to bring into the course. PACE equips students to choose carefully those courses in which they are capable of success, and restrains the universal tendency for introductory courses to become “watered down” to accommodate the lack of preparation of the students who take them.

Faculty complained loudly about the lack of preparation of the students they were encountering in their introductory courses, a pattern which made it difficult for them to keep learning goals at the levels on which we had agreed. Advisors, we discovered, often knew nothing about the courses into which they signed students, and catalog course descriptions provided little guidance. Course instructors knew, sometimes vaguely, what they expected in student preparation for each section, but had no systematic way to communicate this to the students enrolling. By making instructors’ expectations explicit, and sharing these with students and advisors, we realized we could easily reduce all of these concerns. The idea came from one of our faculty, who remembered a system with similar goals in Elizabethtown (Kentucky) Community College in the 1980’s.

It took our General Education Committee three meetings (over two months) to identify and settle on the questions we ask each instructor to answer for each course section scheduled for the coming semester. Instructional Technology took four weeks to create templates for faculty to input their answers accurately into a FileMaker Pro database linked to our website, as well as output templates through which the PACE database information would be accessible to everyone. The Advisement Division, working with our Developmental Studies Division, created a readability service that allows faculty to submit a photocopy of a sample page from the textbook(s) they are using and receive back the Flesch-Kinkaid Grade Level readability score. Since Microsoft Word will calculate readability automatically, this required only the acquisition of a scanner in the Developmental Studies Division.

FileMaker Pro, which comes with the features that allow it to be used for a web database, cost IT $300 (for two copies), and we figure that the two staff who did the setup and designed the templates each invested about 40 hours each in the project, for a rough cost of $2000 (at $25/hour). The 15-person General Education Committee devoted three two-hour meetings to developing the questions, or approximately 90 person-hours in meetings, for $3600 (we use a generous average of $40/hour, to figure the costs of time for faculty and administrative staff.) Adding readability calculations to the basic course information was simple. (And valuable, since all our students take a diagnostic reading test and know their grade-level reading ability.) Since the grammar-checking feature of Microsoft Word calculates readability automatically, all the Developmental Studies Division needed was a scanner (we bought a heavy-duty one that with a self-feeding feature and OCR software for $500) to be ready. Add to this $3200 (to cover 80 hours of administrative time in Advisement to coordinate all this and write the policy proposal and publicity materials, at $40/hour), and $700 to print announcement provided to all faculty and students. In all, we estimate the total cost of development and implementation at $9,800 (of which $8,800 represents the cost for the time of staff who were already employed).

Faculty were not, at first, enthusiastic about making explicit and publishing their expectations for students registering for their courses, but were vocal in their unhappiness with problems concerning student lack of preparation. Much blame was directed toward advising, and there was much clamoring for an increase in course prerequisites.

For the first three years, we made the PACE system voluntary for full-time faculty (but required it for all adjuncts after the first year). We then gave much publicity to the differences in the performance of students who had the information PACE provided versus the students who registered without any clear knowledge of faculty expectations. Faculty quickly saw PACE as in their self-interest (as did students), and word-of-mouth communication quickly sold skeptics on the usefulness of the system.

In addition, after the first year we realized (and shared the finding with faculty) that 96% of all course sections that were cancelled for insufficient registration levels were courses for which faculty had not completed PACE questionnaires. We also published figures on the number of “hits” our PACE information webpages were receiving from students and from advisors.

Full-time faculty now complete PACE questionnaires for over 95% of the course sections they teach, and the Faculty Assembly is considering making the completion of the questionnaire an official faculty responsibility for all 200-and-below sections.

It costs us approximately $3000 per semester to operate the PACE process. We estimate the Developmental Studies Division invests about 25 hours per semester scanning and calculating readability for instructors’ texts (at $40/hour, for about $1000). Institutional Technology provides about 25 hours of routine maintenance of the database and help to instructors inputting information (also about $1000 total), and printing and processing of reminders to faculty and students to use PACE cost about $1000 per semester. These costs are more than offset by benefits arising from improved student retention, improved faculty morale, more effective course size management (resulting from decreased withdrawal rates), and improved levels of student learning.

Before we implemented PACE, we had analyzed section-by-section grade distribution data on all courses, calculating both the withdrawal rates and the success rates (proportion of students earning A, B, or C vs. the number earning D, F, W, or I) in 200-level-or-below courses. Although there was great variability, withdrawals averaged 18% across all course sections, while success rates averaged 66%. We also measured faculty satisfaction with their students’ preparation for the courses they taught.

Since we implemented PACE, we annually compare success rates and withdrawals for sections in which faculty have completed and filed a PACE questionnaire with sections for which no questionnaire was filed. We aggregate these figures by department, division, and for the entire institution.

For the entire institution in 2004-5, for non-PACE sections, withdrawals averaged 16% (i.e., for every 1000 students who began a non-Pace course section, about 160 withdrew), while the rate has dropped to about 6% for PACE sections. It would seem clear that PACE enables students to choose courses for which they are ready more easily, and so reduces the need for withdrawal as a means of correcting for erroneous course selection.

Success rate differences are even more apparent. The success rate for non-PACE sections was 62% in 2004-5, while for PACE sections it was 85%. The evidence suggests strongly that PACE assists students to better select courses for which they are prepared to succeed.

We have also surveyed faculty teaching 200-level-or-below courses about how well prepared students are for the courses for which register. Faculty indicating students are “excellently prepared” or “well prepared” (on a 5-point scale) has risen from 17% before we implemented PACE to 42% in 2004-5. The proportion of faculty saying students were “completely unprepared” to take their course dropped from 38% overall to under 10% in courses where the faculty had submitted a PACE questionnaire.

Attached to this innovative Practice is a document, “PACE_form.pdf,” that shows the questions we have faculty answer for each section of each course they teach. Their answers go into the PACE database. To view our Pace database online as students see it, go to http://www.DeweyU.edu/PACE/.

PACE is used in virtually all 200-level-and-below courses on our main campus, and we are introducing its use in our three off-campus centers. Last year (2005-6) PACE questionnaires were completed for 85% (327 out of 384) 200-level-and-below course sections we offered, and for 98% of such sections on our main campus.

Beginning with the 2005-06 academic year, faculty in our science division are piloting the use of PACE in all undergraduate courses. To do so, they have created a modified version of the questionnaire that is appropriate for upper-division science courses, one that alerts students to the specific cognitive and laboratory-based skills and competencies needed in science courses.

This is a sample of an Innovative Practice, created by AQIP to illustrate how to respond to these items usefully. In response to this last item, normally an institution should list the name, title, telephone number, and email address of the one employee that others should contact to ask questions, learn more about the innovation, or ask the institution for assistance in adopting the innovation in another higher education setting. It the employee to contact changes, it is the institution’s responsibility to return to the Innovation Exchange and update this contact information.

• pace_form.pdf

1. Explanation of how to respond to each item in posting an Innovative Practice