Continued Quality Improvement
To maximize placement of our graduates into career tracks that best match their aspirations and abilities, faculty members work with individual students to determine the student’s professional goals. Faculty design course work and research, initiate participation in professional meetings, and introduce students to professionals at other universities or natural resource agencies. Learning objectives encompass aspects of experimental design, data analysis, statistics, modeling, and public education. We evaluate these learning objectives with both 9-month and 3-year placement surveys and with more extensive surveys of the detailed successes and problems associated with the students academic program and Utah State University. We also conduct interviews with leaders in governmental regulatory and funding agencies to determine how our graduates served their needs. These interviews are conducted annually.

Exit Interviews with graduating seniors

Exit interviews and surveys completed by our graduating students provided varied insights into the successes and failures of our academic programs. Based on these assessment tools, we made the following changes in our curriculum.
- We replaced the Water Law and Policy course (EnvS 5320) with the Human Dimensions in Natural Resources Management course (EnvS 4000). Ongoing poor course reviews of EnvS 5320, coupled with excellent student reviews of the EnvS 4000 resulted in this change in course requirements.
- We enhanced the class project aspects of the Water Quality and Pollution class (AWER 4530) and included a series of oral reports presented by small groups of students taking the course. After implementing these changes, this class became one of our senior capstone courses where students are assigned a real world problem and required to develop a resource management plan. The Utah Division of Water Quality assists us in the development of the specific project each year.

2009 Updates:

Exit interviews with graduating seniors indicated that our previous requirement of having students take two different capstone courses was repetitive and not very helpful led us to reduce the number of capstone experiences from two to one.  This change has added flexibility to student's schedules and will likely allow more students to graduate in a timely manner.

Student concerns over the broad range of students in the Geographic Information Systems course (WATS 4930/6920) was expressed in exit interviews in 2009 and 2009.  The concern was that this large course of 60 students could not be taught effectively as long as both beginning undergraduates, seniors, and some graduate students were enrolled.  We have now broken this class into two courses.  WATS 2930 will be an Introduction to GIS and WATS 4930/6920 will be reserved for seniors and graduate students.  WATS 2930 is now a prerequisite to WATS 4930.

Surveys of learning objective achievement

In 2005 we compiled the results of surveys of undergraduates where they were asked how well instructors achieved the learning objectives designated for a particular course. This information is included in the Achievement of program learning objectives (attached pdf file) and shows the degree of achievement based on a 10-point scale where 10 is scored if all respondents indicated that the course completely satisfied the particular learning objective. Based on the results of these surveys, the AWER department made a variety of changes to our curriculum.
- We added specific spreadsheet exercises to the Fundamental of Watershed Sciences (AWER 3700) and Fish Diversity and Conservation (AWER 3100) courses.
- We added additional statistical homework assignments in the Fish Diversity Laboratory course (AWER 3110) and the Water Quality and Pollution course (AWER 4530).
- We moved the learning objective of gaining proficiency in Geographic Information System software from AWER 4750 to AWER 4930 as this course covers this information well.
- We have modified the course on Professional Orientation (AWER 1200) to included more examples of the earth's coupled biogeochemical cycles and the impacts that humans have had on the function of our ecosystems.