Community College Strategies.

In 1996, when El Paso Community College in El Paso, Texas, committed itself to continuous, ongoing assessment of college performance at all levels and at all sites, it recognized that paper reports must be forgone in favor of computerized assessment. The Office of Institutional Effectiveness has taken the first step toward reporting findings on the college's intranet so that the college community can see the relative quality of instructional and administrative areas based on the latest data. The college evaluates all of its instructional and administrative components. The assessment process, called unit review, defines each college component as a unit. Unit review is modeled on the evaluation of student classroom performance. Data are gathered from approximately thirty sources, including state of Texas reports; college databases; district-wide surveys of students, college employees, unit employees, external users of college services, and employers of graduates; department records; and telephone surveys of graduates and those who have not re-enrolled.