MSCHE Announces June 2023 Actions

Middle States Commission On Higher Education | MSCHE

Evidence Expectations by Standard Guidelines

June 30, 2023

The Evidence Expectations by Standard Guidelines is a companion document to the newly revised Standards for Accreditation and Requirements of Affiliation (Fourteenth Edition). The purpose of this document is to provide a list of expectations for the types of evidence that must be provided to document compliance under each standard. The list of evidence was derived from an analysis of actual institutional submissions and reflects the evidence that institutions and peer evaluators have found most relevant and useful during accreditation activities.

The Policy Unit issued a public Call for Comments from April 3 – 28, 2023, and received 45 comments (41 unduplicated institutions). The Policy Unit reviewed all of the comments received and made appropriate changes to the document such as:

• Expansion of the front pages to explain the main principles

• Replaced sub-populations with “relevant populations”

• Removed suggestions for disaggregation – Institutions will determine relevant sub-groups

• Replaced detailed expense classifications with Expense Analysis, which is a broader term that allows for different accounting standards and classification of expenses

• Clarified that evidence of assessment includes submission of the instrument used for assessment and trend analysis of collected data

• Removed timeframe for enrollment projections

• Clarified the requirement for four primary student achievement measures, as applicable to mission, and offered alternative student achievement measures to accommodate different missions/institutional types

• Reduced duplication between standards when possible

Institutions should note that the Evidence Inventory already allows institutions to cross reference or assign uploaded data to more than one standard. This means that institutions do not have to repeatedly upload evidence as it can be assigned to multiple criteria within the standards.

The new guidelines will be effective July 1, 2023. The final policy documents are available on the Browse Policies and Procedures page and can be found using the search filter.

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