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Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) > QEP Overview

QEP Overview

Quality Enhancement Plan

This page explains what the QEP is and why we are doing it.

This year everyone at Millsaps has the opportunity to make student learning even better than it already is. It's our chance to make a difference. 

The reason for this is that every 10 years Millsaps College comes up for accreditation. Accreditation helps us maintain high standards, fosters public confidence in the quality of our school, and makes us eligible for certain grants and federal aid programs. Our next accreditation decision is December 2012.

As part of accreditation this time around, there is a new requirement called the Quality Enhancement Plan or QEP.

Simply defined, the QEP will be a new program developed by the college that tries to enhance student learning.

What it means to enhance student learning is simply to make a positive change in students' knowledge, skills, behaviors, or values.

This covers a wide range of possibilities. Some schools have focused on improving writing, some on critical thinking, some on math skills, some on student work programs, some on communication, some on civic engagement.  These are just some ideas though. As long as it is doable, can enhance student learning, and has clear outcomes that can be measured, the QEP can be about virtually anything. The QEP is up to us and needs to do what our students need.

An important part of creating our own QEP is that everyone is involved. Every part of the college is important and everyone has a say-from students to faculty to staff to alumni to administration to trustees. While there is a QEP Steering Committee-composed of people from all of these groups - our job is not to create the QEP but just to help the process.  The QEP idea itself will come from you-the members of our college community.

The way it will work is this:  There will be 3 levels of proposals for the QEP.

• Level 1 will just be a short summary of your general idea for the QEP - a title, a contact person, and paragraph description of your idea. We will post all these Level 1 proposals online and on a bulletin board so that people can see what ideas are out there and can join together in working groups if they share interests. The call for Level 1 proposals will be announced September 13, 2010.
• Level 2 will be a somewhat longer proposal, outlining the reasoning behind the idea, the way the idea would work, the learning outcomes of the plan, and some general sense of how the outcomes could be measured.  You don't have to do all the work yourself for these proposals - the QEP committee can help. We will post all these proposals on a bulletin board and online with a space for people to comment on them and rate them. The QEP Steering Committee will look at every proposal and invite the most promising to submit Level 3 proposals.
• Level 3 will be a full proposal, explaining the plan in more detail, including justification, costs, learning outcomes, how to measure those outcomes, and a preliminary literature review for the plan (the QEP committee will help with this too). We will post all Level 3 proposals on a bulletin board and online with a space for people to comment on them and rate them. The college's official QEP will be chosen from these proposals by the QEP Steering Committee. This will not be the "winner" however, since by this point some or all of the Level 3 proposals may wind up being implemented and put into the college's strategic plan.

The proposal that is chosen for the official QEP, however, will be fleshed out by the QEP Steering Committee and the college community members who submitted the proposal and put into the format needed for accreditation. That will include actually beginning to implement the plan.