Planning and Assessment Council

The Planning and Assessment Council (PAC), created in April 2011, reviews assessment processes at The Cooper Union and aids the Office of the President to monitor the effectiveness of planning efforts. Its mission is to identify and use a systematic set of planning and assessment guidelines and metrics to strengthen planning and decision making. We are currently identifying new members for the council.

Some of its key functions are:

  1. To review a campus-wide assessment plan that conforms to the expected assessment standards, namely that activities are “useful, cost-effective, reasonably accurate and truthful, carefully planned, and organized, systematic and sustained.”
  2. To better align assessment measures with stated student learning outcomes and loop-closing activities.
  3. To identify standardized surveys that produce helpful comparative data, to explore the systematic use of standard instruments, and to recommend further types of external benchmarking.
  4. To monitor accountability for assessment activities and to produce a brief annual interpretative review that accompanies “scorecards” or dashboard reports of key performance indicators on the strategic plan. (To help in the identification of key performance indicators.)
  5. To create an annual assessment summary of the reports from each academic unit identifying particular aspects of a faculty's assessment performance.
  6. To recommend the adoption of new technologies or software to lower the overhead costs of assessment and accreditation efforts.

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.