How To Apply


ECUMENICAL FEDERATION OF ACREDITATION ("Board") intends that reports it requires of member schools constitute a dialogue between the Board and constitutive schools. These reports should contain the minimum amount of description and interpretation necessary. The goal of the preparer should be that the report provides sufficient and sufficiently clear information to avoid a follow-up action letter that seeks clarification or additional documentation.

The preparer should construct the report attentive to the context in which Commissioners will read it, namely, as one of sixty or seventy reports. Commissioners review all reports, which they have received in advance of the semi-annual Board meeting. At the meeting and in workgroup of three or four, Commissioners focus intensively on fifteen to twenty reports and make a recommendation to the whole Board in plenary session.

The introduction of the report should identify the context in which it arose, e.g., in the Board's response to the recommendations of a comprehensive or focused visit committee or as a follow -u p to an earlier report, and the specific question or questions the report addresses. The report should then set out the school's interpretive response.

What follows is a series of the most prevalent types of reports that the Board has recently received, with suggestions as to the likely underlying concerns and how the school might frame its response. To be sure, each report is unique and depends, mutatis mutandis, upon the nature of the precise issue and the nature of the distinctive institution.

Addressing issues of planning

Lack of a strategic plan: The Board may require a sequence of reports, including the development of a planning process, the implementation of the process, and the results of the implementation of the plan. The report on the development stage would likely require fewer than five pages to describe the constitutive elements of the developmental process. The implementation report should include, in addition to the strategic plan itself, a two or three page executive summary, identifying the distinctive features of the plan and the process. Ordinarily, only the workgroup would review the detailed strategic plan. The Results report should, also use an executive summary to highlight the chief benefits flowing from the implementation of the plan and would likely include, as an appendix, a copy of the original strategic plan, updated to show completions, revisions, and consequences.

Typical weaknesses in strategic plans include the mirror-image deficiencies of too many details and too few details, a plan that seeks to accomplish 90 percent of its goals in the first quarter of the plan's span, and insufficient collaboration with relevant constituencies. Each stage should describe the approval process and identify the actions taken by the appropriate agencies. Addressing issues of assessment.

Lack of a comprehensive evaluation and assessment plan: The Board may require a sequence of reports, including development of planning process for a comprehensive assessment program, the implementation of the process, and the initial results of the implementation of the program. Rather than the lack of any sort of assessments or evaluation, the Board more often finds assessment activities that are uncoordinated and unintegrated i.e., that are not part of a comprehensive plan designed to feed the results into a strategic planning process, or to provide the basis for improving courses and programs, or both.

Ordinarily, assessment plan reports do not require more than five pages. Unless necessary to make a particular point, specific questionnaires, raw data, and similar forms, if sent, should appear in an appendix.