The Office of Institutional Effectiveness and Planning (OIEP) hosts George Mason’s Excellence in Assessment Awards each year to highlight the university’s commitment to continuous improvement and elevate exemplary assessment practices.
These awards honor assessment efforts across the university, including academic, administrative, co-curricular, and Mason Core assessment. Awards will be given to both specific assessment champions, as well as units who submitted exemplary assessment reports.
2025 Assessment Awards
The second annual Excellence in Assessment Awards reception will be held mid-April 2025. Updates on 2025 award recipients will be available soon!
2024 Assessment Awards
The MAT Art Education, MS Forensic Science, and MS Systems Engineering programs were selected from over 175 academic programs to receive an inaugural Excellence in Annual Assessment Award. Colleagues from the Mason Academic Assessment Council (MAAC), the College of Visual and Performing Arts, the College of Science, and the College of Engineering and Computing celebrated this accomplishment at a reception hosted by OIEP in October 2024.
All three programs engaged in a comprehensive approach to documenting student learning and integrating peer feedback. Each awardee spoke about how their program’s assessment efforts support continuous improvement. The complete assessment plan and specific strengths for each awardee are included below.
MAT Art Education
The program presented a strong longitudinal improvement plan that built upon findings from year-to-year. By combining student self-perceptions and observer perceptions, the program effectively illustrated how students demonstrated professional dispositions, which were established in the program’s external standards.
The assessment results highlighted the need for prerequisite knowledge in principles of statistics. The program improved the curriculum and launched a quantitative methods for forensic science course.
MS Systems Engineering
The program incorporated detailed assessment methods that captured how students integrated model-based and architectural-based systems engineering concepts. Both instructors and external reviewers from the industry engaged in the process to provide meaningful feedback to the students and program.