An Introduction to ATS

Adapted from an oral presentation by William C. Miller, Director, Accreditation and Institutional Evaluation

The goal for schools is to develop a culture of improvement and to demonstrate that culture within their self-study. We don't set a minimum bar, but a bar that keeps moving up over time. The regional accrediting agencies seek evidence of student learning assessment as almost their only standard of quality whereas the ATS Commission is broader, including programmatic and institutional assessment.

We have ten institutional standards and standards for each degree program. One option is for the self-study to fold the presentation of the approved degree programs into the discussion of General Institutional Standard Four, "The Theological Curriculum," which makes a general distinction between professional and academic programs.

The first paragraph under each institutional standard is the standard itself. The items that follow are concepts, or articulations, of that standard. The goal is to describe your actual condition in light of the first paragraph. The preferred strategy is not to go paragraph by paragraph but to address the standard in its fullest terms. "Should" statements are taken to be descriptions of quality, which are by their nature somewhat flexible. Quality is a cultural concept, and not every institution has the same understanding of quality. For some, quality is a monetary value while in others it's aesthetics.

Normative statements in the standards, which are indicated by the word "shall" instead of "should," create an expectation to which the institution should conform. Nonconformity to normative expectations can have accrediting consequences. A third kind of statement is called a mandatory requirement, and the nine mandatory requirements constitute a specialized subset of the normative expectations. They are found in standards Two (Integrity) and Seven (Students). Failure to adhere to the mandatory requirements has legal ramifications.

The ATS Commission is recognized by the U.S. Department of Education. One requirement of this recognition is that the ATS Commission goes through its own accreditation process, creating the equivalent of its own self-study. This process happens not less frequently than every five years.

Four themes run throughout the standards: globalization, diversity, freedom of inquiry, and evaluation. While each one of these themes has an anchor in a specific context, they're also woven into various places throughout the standards, which use evaluation as a synonym for assessment. Evaluation, for instance, is anchored in Standard 1 but shows up in most of the institutional standards in some way as well as in the degree program standards.

It's possible that one could organize a self-study document around the four themes. What's being looked at aren't the discrete standards but all the standards working together. We ought to pay attention to the themes in all the locations where they appear, not just in their primary locations. The danger is that groups working on individual standards will create stand-alone chapters that aren't functionally integrated into the greater life of the self-study.

With this holistic approach, what is it that we're attempting to do? We want to see evidence that the school is living the normative expectations and has developed a culture of improvement, of improving the school's quality. The question is where are we as an institution relative to the same set of standards a decade ago. Do we evidence greater quality now than we did a decade ago? That's an assessment item for an individual institution and also an assessment item for the ATS Commission.

The Higher Learning Commission standards, for example, are future-oriented. Of course, the ATS Commission is interested in the future, but at the same time, the future is unknown. Accrediting decisions are based on a risk/analysis model. We don't know absolutely what a school might do following an accreditation visit in the period of its accredited status. The future cast that the Commissioners can do is based on the trajectory of the institution. The ATS Commissioners are looking for the added capacity not only to plan but to implement the plan. Since 1996, there is a greater emphasis on analysis of the data and decisionmaking within the institution.

The self-study may look a lot like an institutional catalog, but analysis is what primarily interests the Commissioners. We want to know whether the school understands what is happening. What is quality in a school? What do we need to sustain and nurture it? What will we do and how do we know when we're successful in doing what we do? For instance a good self-study doesn't just check off the box on whether you have a mission statement but you follow through with an explanation of what it means to have a mission statement and whether it's effective.

We're assessing both your abilities to assess and your institutional effectiveness. There's an expectation that there needs to be a high level of transparency in the self-study.

The standards form a basis for a self-study, and they also form a basis for the evaluation committee's work. The visiting committee is not there to redo the self-study. The committee is there fundamentally to do a spot-check. By analogy, an outside financial auditor samples the process being pursued by an institution; this is what the ATS Commission evaluation committee is doing sampling an institution's process. The background of the visit is the standards, which represent a consensus within a very diverse community of best practices.

The document a school produces is an evaluative document. This emphasis on evaluation has been around for a long time, since before your last reaffirmation visit. There should be assessment/evaluation information in the institution about its effectiveness and the adequacy of its capacity. A decade ago, institutions had to go out and find the data. By this point, you should have structures for data collection already in place. It's troubling if the evaluation team arrives on campus and finds that the current data collection began with that self-study.

The truncation of assessment is a fundamental problem in light of the standards. We don't need to assess everything, but we do need to address the significant elements. If significant elements are being truncated because of political or cultural issues, then that's a problem for the Commissioners. It's in your favor to be candid (transparent) about both strengths and areas of difficulties.

When you submit materials to the Board of Commissioners for review, there's a confidentiality clause that comes into play. ATS is free to use it for its internal purposes but does not make this information publicly available.