How to Choose a Higher Education Assessment Software

November 1, 2022 Watermark Insights

Assessments provide institution administrators, instructors, and decision-makers with information that aid in improving the learning experience, setting goals, and driving institutional change. Gathering enough data to support your initiatives can be a lengthy and time-consuming process without the proper software, and you should ensure your software is capable of meeting your needs. 

Higher education assessment software aid in improving your institution and driving meaningful change for your students. Deciding on the right software for your institution is not a light decision. When choosing software and a provider, you should consider a few key criteria you expect them to meet for seamless integration and prompt results. 

What Is Higher Education Assessment Software?

Assessment software enables higher education administrators to distribute assessments to students. Assessments could include exams, tests, self-surveys, course evaluations, and more. These systems streamline the data collection and review process and can simplify the grading and analyzing process. 

This software typically allows instructors or administrators to write new questions or select from pre-written questions to modify assessments to fit student needs and course materials. Although this software can run independently, they are most efficient when they pair with your current student information systems. 

Benefits of Higher Education Assessment Software

Higher education assessment software benefits your students, staff, and institution. As you collect more data, you can drive meaningful change and work to improve student learning experiences and outcomes. Choosing high-quality assessment software is essential for reaping the benefits it can provide your institution. With higher education assessment software, you can:

  • Develop solutions: Higher education assessment software presents solutions even during the most unprecedented times. You have success resources ready for you whenever you need them. You can respond to your student's needs in record time. 
  • Save time and effort: Technology can help reduce the time your faculty and staff need to complete small, everyday tasks. You can increase communication efforts and make it easier to distribute, review, and share student assessments. 
  • Answer urgent questions: When your students face classroom or campus disruptions, you can discover what they need to get back on track by administering assessments. You don't need to compile papers for your students when you can use a few clicks to meet them where they are. 
  • Drive meaningful change: Adopting efficient assessment practices enables you to set your sights on continuous improvement. With the ability to capture more information than ever before, you can develop initiatives and reach new goals to benefit your students and staff. 
  • Stay up-to-date: Many colleges and universities have already made the switch to online assessment systems. You can compete with other higher ed institutions by adopting the practices that make them successful. Additionally, you can ensure your instructors and staff are comfortable using technology in the modern classroom.

How to Choose a Higher Education Assessment Software

How to Choose a Higher Education Assessment Software

Choosing a software provider is critical for implementing helpful software that benefits your students and staff. Your provider should be capable of tailoring to your specific needs and have strong user-friendliness, great support, and robust reporting. Software that is simple to use and provides excellent resources and solutions can aid in improving your college or university. 

Watermark offers all these and more, and institutions have trusted us to deliver solutions to their institutions for years. Colleges and universities have chosen us as their higher education assessment software provider because we meet all of their needs.

For other higher education institutions, Watermark has:

  • Enabled administrators to map specific criteria to their unique outcomes.
  • Encouraged staff to aggregate and disaggregate data at will.
  • Supported faculty with an abundance of resources.
  • Provided same-day solutions when administrators needed assistance.
  • Created user-friendly, effective, and efficient solutions.

What Is Watermark Planning & Self-Study?

Watermark Planning & Self-Study fosters campus improvement and collaboration. This system streamlines your ability to gather, reflect, understand, and act on student assessments. This tool is especially useful for addressing your academic and non-academic assessment needs and concerns. 

With Watermark Planning & Self-Study, you can create holistic experiences and evaluate learning outcome statuses when convenient. Your team can easily collaborate and assess objectives to improve your institution. When you align your assessment plans with strategic plans, you can manage each plan within the same system, reducing the effort you or your team needs to expend to progress forward. 

Watermark also offers accreditation self-studies in the Planning & Self-Study program. You can create custom templates for any accrediting body, including at an institutional or programmatic level. Administrators at the highest level can observe the status of the self-studies, and contributors can quickly jump in to form new narratives. You can choose who is able to see what information, so when your team logs on to the tool, they only see the information that pertains to them. 

How to Improve Institutional Effectiveness With Planning & Self-Study

Watermark Planning & Self-Study enables you to improve institutional effectiveness. With our program, you can track educational outcomes and map them throughout your institution. Your academic units can address these outcomes and determine the degree to which your team meets them. You'll have the option to introduce, reinforce, or master any outcome you choose to focus on. You can also design measurements for each outcome, and the software will automatically add this task to your assessment plan, so you can continually monitor progress and to-dos. 

Additionally, it's easy to make sense of data without riffling through your system because you can choose how you would like to review results. You'll be able to manually enter data, upload data from other parts of your system, and attach a roster for each team member via email. Additionally, you can pull data from other Watermark programs or your internal student information systems for seamless flow. 

As your institution continues to improve year after year, you can track trends and compare assessment plans and results over time. You can evaluate your completion rate and review other staff members' actions to complete your goals and meet objectives. 

Choose Accreditation Software From Watermark

Watermark offers a convenient, integrated hub to collect and analyze meaningful data. We've been providing higher ed solutions for over two decades, and we want to bring you an assessment solution that will drive change. With our assessment and accreditation software, you can create a collaborative workspace for your team to review programs and assess effectiveness. 

You can easily collaborate with your team to find new solutions that make a holistic experience for your students. Watermark Planning & Self-Study enable institutions to seek continuous improvement. Request a demo of our software today to discover what we can do for your institution. 

Choose Accreditation Software From Watermark

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