Making the Implicit Explicit: Creating Performance Expectations for the Dissertation

Assessment in doctoral programs has long been overlooked, despite its crucial role in determining departmental success. A dissertation provides the most objective measure of a program's effectiveness, and proper assessment can help departments achieve excellence by identifying strengths and weaknesses. This book explores the process of making explicit the implicit "rules" for assessing dissertations, with a focus on clarifying performance expectations for graduate students. The author proposes the use of rubrics to facilitate formative assessment, rather than rating individual components or providing summary scores. A study involving over 270 faculty members from ten disciplines reveals their implicit standards for evaluating dissertations and provides practical implications for various stakeholders. The methods described can be adapted for assessing other final educational products, such as capstone courses, senior theses, comprehensive exams, papers, and journal articles. By making performance expectations more transparent, graduate students can achieve higher levels of accomplishment.