As we are sure you are aware, we were the midst of the ending of the second trimester and the beginning of the third trimester. A survey goes out every year to recent graduates to get feedback about our program here at Maryknoll and to see if our program has done well to prepare them for the college experience. In the past few years, besides not preparing them to deal with hard and fast deadlines, the basis of the findings deal mainly with assessment.
Graduates claim to have been ineptly prepared for traditional college assessments.
In addition to the types of assessment, the scheduling of assessments is also a concern for the college freshman. The challenge of our faculty has been and continues to be to initiate student understanding through relevant content, progressive pedagogy, and authentic assessment. It seems, however, that our struggle to teach content that is relevant and meaningful to our students is at a crossroads with what colleges expect our students to do in their courses. We would like to showcase responses from our essential school graduates in our Perspectives section. You will find that the issue of comprehensive testing is consistent throughout all of the graduate responses.