A Simple Tool For Quality Assessment In Education

Abstract

A quality assessment tool is presented to detect the presence of out-of-control conditions in a school course system. The tool detects whether or not a set of courses offered by a certain discipline constitutes a stable (or in-control) system of courses. A system of courses is said to be stable if the variation in students' performance from course to course is only due to common causes. Students' performance in a course may be measured by their term grades in that course or any other method of evaluation. The proposed quality tool has the advantage of being applicable to numerical grades as well as to ordinal letter grades such as A, B, C, etc. A further advantage is that the proposed tool can be implemented graphically as a quality control chart. A pilot case study of the proposed tool was initiated in Fall 1995 to monitor a system of six of basic 200-level courses in the Department of Business Administration at Alabama State University. The results of this pilot study show that the system was out-of-control for the period Fall 1995 to Fall 1999 and then became in-control in Fall 2001.