Campus leaders must constantly assess facility and equipment needs to continue offering innovative educational experiences that appeal to today’s cultured students. In some cases, the need to repair or replace an aging building is obvious; in other instances, faculty may not be aware that there’s a problem with technology until students raise the issue.
Academic Pharmacy Now asked deans and faculty to share their experiences and explain the processes they used in evaluating new technologies, research space, lab equipment, classrooms and buildings. Executing improvements wasn’t easy but was well worth the work.
A More Secure Seating Plan Prior to 2010, and completion of a new building at the UniverUniversity of sity of Maryland School Maryland of Pharmacy, each required exam was held in two 130-seat lecture halls in order to maintain an empty seat between test takers. With the new building, scheduling needs dictated that 120 student pharmacists based at the Baltimore campus would need to take exams in a single 200-seat lecture hall; however, this would not allow for an empty seat between each test taker. Additionally, faculty and teaching assistants could not always identify by name a student whose behavior raised suspicion during an exam. Meanwhile, exams taken by student pharmacists at the school’s satellite campus at the Universities at Shady Grove in Rockville, Maryland, were express mailed to Baltimore for grading, delaying the time it took for students to receive exam scores. Changes in the curriculum and an increased frequency of assessments brought the issues to an apex in late 2010, when it was determined that slow feedback on exams could be hurting student learning. The school’s administration acted to alleviate concerns on both issues. They used resources from the IT department, the Office of Academic Affairs, faculty course managers, teaching assistants in Baltimore and staff at Shady Grove. The Office of Academic Affairs worked with the IT department to assign random exam seating positions in Baltimore. This eliminated the issue of students feeling under suspicion if they were always assigned seats in the front of the room, and it made it easy for
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ACADEMIC PHARMACY NOW Summer 2012
proctors to receive and post unique seating assignments for a large number of exams and quizzes. Implementation funding was internal and minimal, but the results were highly visible. For example, seats in the large lecture halls were labeled with row and seat numbers, allowing proctors to easily identify students using their position and the seating lists. Randomized seat assignments are now autogenerated from class enrollment lists and e-mailed days in advance to faculty course managers and teaching assistants. The pilot process launched in spring 2011. Subsequently, allegations of cheating on exams vanished, tardiness entering exams became nearly nonexistent, and new students effortlessly adopted the procedure. Addressing the issue of delayed exam results, a system was devised to score multiple-choice exams using optical scanning of Scantrons simultaneously at Shady Grove and Baltimore. This required merging the scores from both campuses into a single errorfree database that could be used for reliable and fast exam data analysis. Equipment and software were purchased for approximately $1,700, and the school’s assistant dean for instructional technology worked with the university’s test scoring center to customize the exam data analysis reports. Cost savings are derived from the electronic transfer of scores and exam data to Baltimore. Turnaround time for exam grading has gone from more than a week to same-day in most cases, and student feedback is extremely positive.