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AssessmentsPersonal connections count mostBy Jo Pitkin K'78How do recent Hamilton students feel about their college experience? What forms of teaching and mentoring do they find most beneficial? What cultural and social experiences mean the most to them? What concerns do they have about their Hamilton education? One Hamilton student wrote to friends and family about his "exile in upper New York." But taking a personal interest in his education, his professors inspired him to pursue a career in teaching rather than law, finance or diplomatic service. They introduced him to the poetry of Dante and Provençal troubadours and engaged him in long talks after classes. While he avoided parties and felt that he didn't fit in socially, he pursued his talent for writing and contributed poems to Hamilton's literary magazine. That transfer student, the illustrious poet Ezra Pound, came to the Hill in the fall of 1903. Interestingly, two independent assessment tools, the 2007 Higher Education Data Sharing Senior Survey and the Mellon Assessment Project, reveal that many Hamilton students today report similar experiences. A century after Pound, contemporary students enjoy many of the same advantages — and face some of the same challenges — of an education at Hamilton. "What we've learned," says Dan Chambliss, the Eugene M. Tobin Distinguished Professor of Sociology, "is that a Hamilton education rests on the strength of personal relationships the student has — relationships with friends and with teachers. Those personal connections drive all the other good things that come. Hamilton is first and foremost a community. All of the educational good we offer really depends on that." Directed by Chambliss, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Project for Assessment of Liberal Arts Education, known as the Mellon Assessment Project, is a 10-year study that was launched at Hamilton College in 1999 and began charting students in 2001. Its purpose is to answer a deceptively simple question: "How is the College doing?" It is designed to evaluate learning in liberal arts colleges and to establish objective sources of assessment. Among many other activities, the project conducted a comprehensive study of writing improvement over time. Researchers collected 1,100 college papers (other than senior theses), took some precautions to avoid skewing the findings, and had an outside panel of writing teachers and educators evaluate series of papers from individual but anonymous students on the basis of eight criteria for effective writing. The readers found that they could almost always order the papers chronologically — from high school to senior year on the Hill — and they saw a particularly dramatic leap in writing skill during the first year of college. The Mellon Assessment Project also assessed public speaking at the College by videotaping and evaluating nearly 100 oral presentations by sophomores and seniors. Roughly 60 percent of Hamilton students have public speaking opportunities in their classes, but the project found that students desire even more, despite the customary jitters when it's their turn to speak. And it found that a little practice in public speaking goes a long way: As with writing, seniors typically had more fully developed speaking skills, but the most dramatic gains came early in college. Other teaching-related findings: Students lean heavily on professors' reputations and other students' opinions when choosing courses, and students' experiences in introductory courses — for better and for worse — play a crucial role in their decisions about what coursework and concentrations to pursue. "You need teachers who want to teach and students who want to learn, and the college must provide opportunities for those groups to get together," Chambliss says. "Scheduling decisions, we found, are much more important than usually thought. Getting students in touch with exciting teachers in the first year is also very important." The practical aim of the project is to find ways to improve teaching and academic policy at the College. While there is no direct, formal implementation of results, Chambliss shares the outcomes and communicates trends through annual reports to Hamilton's faculty, administration and trustees. The impact has been substantial, both in honing and extending those values and practices at which Hamilton excels — such as writing and public speaking — and in identifying less productive ones. An example: The College's sophomore seminars, introduced in 2001, were dropped after the project found that the seminars were not fully serving their aims.
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