Further, the teaching process itself is sometimes open-ended. Formal lectures and discussions may extend only as long as a class period, but individual tutorial meetings and laboratory sessions with students frequently last much longer. Teaching includes evaluating student performance and providing feedback. Faculty members spend time creating appropriate testing material, grading examinations, and writing commentary to students concerning their performance on exams. In addition, faculty monitor the success of academic programs through student outcome assessment activities that establish and monitor overall student performance.
Teaching also requires a great deal of time working with students to improve their writing.
The quality of all education and the acquisition of critical thinking skills is linked in a direct way to the amount of writing that students do. Teaching that promotes clear and concise writing, therefore, is essential. However, acquiring those writing skills takes extensive practice and requires considerable faculty assistance in the form of written and oral comments on papers and exams. Mentoring those students, sometimes on a daily basis, is an important part of the entire teaching program, and individual attention is especially intensive as graduate students conduct and report their research projects that culminate in a master's thesis or doctoral dissertation. Similarly, advising is intimately related to the educational process.