Issues of accreditation and evaluation like those facing Penn's Engineering School are nothing new to two of the University's other undergraduate programs, but they are pretty unfamiliar to administrators in the College.
National external organizations must accredit the School of Nursing, the Wharton School and the University as a whole in a process similar to the one the School of Engineering and Applied Science is undergoing.
But because the College of Arts and Sciences is not specifically pre-professional, it is not subject to a formal accreditation process.
Instead, every year two to four programs in the College undergo internal reviews and evaluations from an outside commission.
"A committee of external visitors is invited to come to campus for a few days and talk to ... whoever might be able to provide some insight," College Dean Dennis DeTurck said. "Then the committee will produce its own report ... which the University uses to correct problems."
DeTurck said that the commission members are chosen from equivalent departments and programs at peer institutions, which include other Ivy League schools and major research universities.
Although students are not directly involved in this evaluation process, DeTurck said that student feedback factors heavily into the commission's report. Students and student groups will sometimes submit independently conducted department reviews to administrators.
According to School of Arts and Sciences Dean Rebecca Bushnell, all programs in the College are subject to evaluation.
"They assess the faculty, they look at undergraduate education, they look at graduate education," Bushnell said, adding that the review teams report to her.
This year, DeTurck said, the Linguistics and Biochemistry departments, among others, will be up for review.
Once the commission submits a formal report to Bushnell and DeTurck, the results and recommendations are used by the College to determine which departments merit greater resources or, in rare cases, termination.
DeTurck noted that the now-defunct Regional Science Department was disbanded due to reports from a commission which deemed the program no longer relevant. Its professors were then reassigned to appropriate departments, including Political Science.
But this type of response is not typical, DeTurck said, and most programs consistently receive high ratings.
Despite the serious consideration given to the commissions' findings, Bushnell said that the nature of the School of Arts and Sciences evaluation process is entirely separate from the formal accreditation process of the three other schools.
"We're not a professional school -- we don't answer to a professional organization in the way that Engineering does," Bushnell said.
According to Wharton spokeswoman Tracy Liebman, Wharton will be up for accreditation by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business in 2008.
The Nursing School is up for accreditation by the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education in 2014, according to Nursing spokeswoman Joy McIntyre.
The University itself, DeTurck said, will be evaluated for accreditation again in 2014 by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education -- a non-governmental organization that conducts accreditation reviews of major U.S. universities.
