[toggle title="Invitation from the university"]
In the final accreditation and renewal of accreditation, the process begins when the university president or CEO of the academic unit seeking accreditation sends an invitation to the President. After the initial site visit, visits are made every six years.
A university has invited the Council to review the program and make a judgment journalism accreditation may withdraw his invitation at any time prior to the Board's final decision on the accreditation status of the program. The Board may waive the accreditation of a program if, after having been duly notified, the program does not allow a new accreditation visit.
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[toggle title="Postponement of visits"]Generally, the Council postponed accreditation visits, except under extraordinary circumstances. For example, do not grant a postponement of one year for purposes of convenience, programming, new buildings, internal review or a change of managers. The President of the Council has the authority to grant postponements for one year. The full Board must decide on requests for a postponement for two years.[/toggle]
[toggle title="The Self-Study"]
The core of the accreditation process is the self-study, a systematic review by the academic unit of the environment in which it operates, its mission, its activities, achievements and future plans. Most program faculty must have participated and accepted the results of this study.
The self-study should focus on the degree to which an academic unit achieves its objectives. Thus, quantitative judgments must be evaluated on the equipment, faculty, and other budgets to demonstrate how they contribute to the unit to achieve its objective. The team reports contain a mission statement provided by the program to help the Council to determine how the program meets its goals.
Another key point of the self-study is the degree to which the program meets the accreditation standards. Most accreditation standards fall within the scope of a comprehensive self-study.
The program is voluntarily participating in the accreditation process as a means of evaluating and improving their quality. This participation includes evaluations of the program and its activities according to the standards of the Council.
The self-study report will be submitted to the Head of Accreditation and evaluation team a month before the due date of visit to the academic unit that requested the review of its journalism program. So, if the visit has been agreed for the month of September, the team of evaluators receive a copy in digital or CD and a paper in August. For a proper development process visit, it is important that the evaluation team members have the time to thoroughly review the self-study report prepared and presented by the academic unit.
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[toggle title="Evaluators visits: pre-accreditation and accreditation"]
The Council makes two kinds of views: a) pre-accreditation b) accreditation. The pre-accreditation visit is intended to establish whether the academic unit meets the minimum standards to be accredited. On this visit the Council sends an appraiser who for a period of three to four days evaluated together with managers, faculty, graduates and employers comply with the standards and performs academic advising for making the final decision, to submit their application to the Council, by the institution that wishes to be accredited. At the end of the visit will prepare a preliminary report with a summary of the facts and figures relating to compliance with the standards. This report will be forwarded promptly to the Academic Secretariat.
The accreditation visit is conducted four evaluators (two academic and two professional) have reviewed in detail and with one month's notice self-study. For three days will meet with different members of the academic unit, with graduates and employers to verify the evidence of compliance with the standards CLAEP.
Generally the evaluation team will arrive to college on a Sunday night, and make his assessment on Monday and Tuesday. On Wednesday morning the team will meet with the chief executive officer of the university and the journalism program administrator to consider the results of the visit. The team will complete its written report and will discuss with the administrators. The Accreditation Manager will send a copy of the Final Report of the Academic Evaluation of CLAEP. Then, the coordination of the Academic shall forward a copy thereof to the members of the Council for consideration.
During the visit the team will try to directly recognize everything you can about the program. Teams of evaluators examine all aspects of the program and the university that may affect the quality of the program. The team members determine quality through interviews with faculty, administrators and students, so do visiting classes, examining the records of students and alumni and review of equipment, buildings and budget analysis and implementation.
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[toggle title="Accreditation decisions"]
The reviewers write their report and share it with the directors of the academic unit. This report is sent to CLAEP for decision making.
Council decisions are classified into three categories: accreditation, provisional accreditation and negative. Accreditation is granted to academic units that meet all the standards CLAEP.
A program can receive provisional accreditation if the Council has found flaws that can be corrected in a relatively short period, at most a year. Provisional accreditation may not extend beyond one year. When accreditation is provisional, the President of the Council included in the letter to the chief administrator of the university the details of the deficiencies and the process for the review of the Council. Teams and schools should consider provisional accreditation is punitive and often is the initiative that requires faculty and administrators to correct weaknesses.
No accredit those programs, whose weaknesses are not solvable in the short term (one year or less).
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