Assessment requirements often raise great concerns among departments and faculty: fear of loss of autonomy, distraction from primary departmental goals, and the creation of alien and artificial external standards. This article demonstrates how one political science department directly responded to their own unique circumstances in assessing their…

The assessment literature frequently ignores the quandary of the department resistant to assessment in its discussion of implementing departmental plans and instead focuses on idealized implementation processes. The approach articulated in this article builds on the assessment literature, generating the hypothesis that a grassroots approach to…