What Can a Mock Site Visit Reveal?

Hello, everyone! We’re spending some time talking about mock site visits, one possible step in preparing well for your program’s ARC-PA site visit. In my last blog, I began a discussion of mock site visits by looking at what happens during that process and why we describe it as a dress rehearsal for the real thing.

This week, let's talk about what that rehearsal can accomplish. Of course, it's reassuring when your application is thorough, your documentation is organized, your virtual files work exactly as intended, and everyone knows where to find what they need. But if there's a vulnerability somewhere in your preparation, the mock site visit is exactly where you want to discover it.

There's an important difference between knowing your program is doing something, and being able to demonstrate, through readily available evidence, that it is doing everything the Standard requires. In a mock visit, we ask, “Does our preparation hold up when an outside viewer puts it to the test?”

Preparation and Practice Serve Different Purposes

If you've already worked with Scott Massey PhD, LLC’s consultants to prepare for your review, you might reasonably ask why you need a mock site visit, too. And that’s a fair question, so let’s look at why I would so strongly recommend it.

Simply put, the two processes serve different purposes. During consulting, we're working with you to understand requirements, evaluate your program, assemble evidence, and prepare for the review.

A mock visit changes the conditions. Instead of helping you build the preparation, the mock team approaches what you've built from the perspective of an outside reviewer and tests how all of those pieces work together; it’s a stress test of the preparation that consulting helped you build.

Even excellent preparation can benefit from being stress-tested. Here are some reasons why:

1) A mock site visit lets you see your program through different eyes.

You and your team have probably spent countless hours with your application, documentation, policies, website, and supporting materials. You know the evidence backward and forward. You know what an abbreviation means, where a particular document lives, and how one piece of evidence connects to another. But an outside reviewer doesn't necessarily know any of that, and it’s risky to assume that what is perfectly clear to you will be the same for them.

Consider a Standard involving a program policy. You have the policy, so you may feel confident that you've addressed the requirement.

But is having the policy enough? Perhaps the Standard also calls for publishing the policy, making it readily available, and applying it consistently. Now the evidence may need to tell a much more complete story. Where is the policy published? Can students readily find it? How and when are students informed about it? What readily available evidence demonstrates that the program consistently follows the requirement of the Standard in practice?

The same principle can apply throughout your documentation. A meeting took place—but do the minutes demonstrate the relevant discussion? A process exists—but is there evidence showing how it operates? Information appears in one location—but is it consistent with what appears elsewhere? This is where accreditation preparation can become extraordinarily granular.

Details that may seem insignificant in the ordinary operation of your program can become very significant indeed when they are part of the evidence needed to demonstrate compliance.

And this is also where a mock site visit can be so valuable. Even a program that has prepared carefully may benefit from having someone approach that evidence as a reviewer would, following the trail from the requirement to the documentation and asking whether every part of the story can actually be verified.

The question isn't simply, “Do we do this?” but also, “Can someone from outside our program see clearly that we do this?”

2) A mock site visit can locate gaps.

A mock site visit can identify vulnerabilities in many areas of your preparation. Sometimes the problem is missing information. Sometimes the information exists but isn't where someone expects to find it. A document may be difficult to locate, a website may contain information that doesn't quite match another source, or a virtual file structure that seems perfectly logical to its creators may confuse someone navigating it for the first time.

None of those discoveries means your preparation has failed. They mean the mock visit is doing its job.

This is especially important for virtual files. Having the evidence is only part of the equation. That evidence also needs to be developed and organized so that reviewers can locate what they need and understand how it supports what your program has represented.

“We have that somewhere” may be perfectly true. It just isn't where you want the conversation to end.

3) In a mock site visit, time is on your side.

Under the current review process, programs may have an opportunity to respond to observations arising from the site visit. That makes preparation especially important. When you identify potential issues ahead of the actual review, your program has time to determine what to address, what supporting evidence you may need, and how to organize and present it.

A mock visit gives you something the actual visit cannot: the chance to discover a vulnerability while you still have time to work on it.

That doesn't mean every issue can or even should be “fixed” overnight. Accreditation preparation isn't about creating last-minute evidence to make a problem disappear. However, the earlier you identify a concern, the more thoughtfully you can respond.

If the mock team finds a gap in your application, a discrepancy on your website, a weakness in your supporting documentation, or a virtual file that doesn't work as smoothly as everyone expected, you've learned something valuable while you still have an opportunity to act on it.

In our next blog…

Documents and virtual files aren't the only things that will be tested during an ARC-PA site visit. People will be, too.

In our final blog in this series, we'll look at how mock interviews can help prepare faculty, staff, senior administrators, preceptors, and students for the questions they may encounter during the real visit. Hope to see you then!