Quality Enhancement Plan

The Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) Tigers Excel: Empower through Experience (Tigers Excel) aims to enhance undergraduate students’ career readiness by expanding experiential learning opportunities across the institution. Experiential learning was chosen as the QEP topic because research demonstrates that participation in such activities benefits students by improving problem-solving skills, critical thinking, career readiness, and overall engagement. Tigers Excel will develop an infrastructure to cultivate and support a more diverse offering of experiential learning activities and increasing student awareness of how these activities connect to career competency development. 

Mission

The mission of Tigers Excel is to enhance student learning and success by providing undergraduate students with expanded opportunities to engage in experiential learning across curricular and co-curricular environments. Over the five-year cycle, the QEP will focus on broadening course-based experiential learning through faculty training and development, increasing opportunities for on-campus internships that incorporate career competency development, and developing training resources, including a student toolkit and a digital badging Career Development Digital Pathway. These efforts aim to help students connect their in-class and out-of-class experiences to career-readiness competencies and transferable skills. 

This QEP directly supports the goals and objectives of the University’s 2023-2028 Strategic Plan, Ascend, by addressing one of the institutional objectives to “prepare our students for the workforce, entrepreneurial ventures, and graduate school, and perhaps more importantly, preparing them for lifelong professional and career success” (UofM, 2023, p. 10). Tigers Excel aims to achieve this by creating an intentional learning environment where undergraduate students have multiple opportunities to participate in experiential learning activities and connect these experiences to the development of career competency skills. Another Ascend institutional objective is to produce graduates who are successful in their careers and lives. Part of this success lies in ensuring students gain the necessary skills to enter and advance in the workforce. Tigers Excel builds on the University’s mission by expanding, enhancing, and elevating experiential learning opportunities across the institution.  

What is a QEP?

QEP stands for "Quality Enhancement Plan." In short, a QEP is a plan to implement and assess a focused set of initiatives designed to improve student learning and/or success across the university. Overall, the QEP provides an opportunity to coordinate and strengthen educational experiences of University of Memphis students. For more information about what a QEP is or further details about the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC), visit the SACSCOC Commission on Colleges website at http://sacscoc.org. 

According to SACSCOC guidelines, a QEP should: 

1. Contribute to the improvement of student learning and/or success to the environment for student learning or success;
2. Emerge from an institutional process that identifies key issues emerging from institutional assessment;
3. Be based on demonstrated need or opportunity to improve student learning or success that can be supported by data;
4. Be linked to the university strategic plan and/or mission;
5. Be focused and assessable;
6. Not be narrowly targeted toward a small or isolated subset of the University of Memphis student body;
7. Have the support of students, faculty, and other stakeholder groups that may be involved in its implementation.