Seven committees have been formed to conduct the self-studies necessary to complete the Compliance Certification portion of the SACS reaffirmation process. Each committee has been assigned a different set of Core Requirements, Comprehensive Standards, and Federal Requirements on which to focus, and all of their analyses should be completed by the end of spring semester 2008.

  

Members of each committee are responsible for:

• carefully analyzing and interpreting each Core Requirement, Comprehensive Standard, and Federal Requirement assigned to their committee;
• determining and stating in one or two words the extent to which NKU is in compliance, partial compliance, or non-compliance with each standard;
• gathering, organizing, and submitting high-quality, appropriate evidence to support and explain whatever determination of compliance is made;
• preparing an outline or rough draft of the committee’s conclusion about each standard, the evidence available to support it, and a narrative explanation.

 
 
Compliance committees are not expected to write the final report or even “their sections” of it. Instead, the Compliance Certification will be written by one person to ensure that it has a single, clear voice and is consistent throughout in style, tone, and tenor. Committees are, however, expected to:

• provide the writer/editor with all necessary information and documentation to write the report, and
• review drafts of the report for accuracy with respect to the standards they were assigned.

 
 
For additional information:

This link to excerpts from the "Compliance Certification" portion of the SACS’s Handbook for Reaffirmation of Accreditation provides a brief but authoritative overview of the Compliance Certification process to guide committee discussions and deliberations.

Committee members may also find it helpful to review Appendix C: Examples of Narratives for the Compliance Certification in The Handbook for Reaffirmation of Accreditation. It provides several samples of the types of reasoning and evidence that are expected in the compliance document. It's available online in pdf format, and Appendix C begins on page 47.