Institutional Assessment & Evaluation (IAE) provides a variety of evaluation and assessment services to the University of Washington community and outside agencies. Formerly the Office of Educational Assessment, IAE transitioned to the Institutional Analytics & Decision Support division of Finance, Planning & Budgeting in May 2025.
We offer nationally recognized course evaluation services to UW and institutions throughout the United States and provide placement classroom test scoring to the University of Washington Seattle campus. Our research staff are specialists in quantitative and qualitative methods, and collaborate with UW faculty and staff to create effective assessment strategies, particularly in the areas of assessment of college outcomes, survey research, and evaluation of grant-funded programs.
The IAE main office is located just a few blocks west of the UW Seattle campus. Fees are established relative to cost of service, and project estimates are provided in advance. Some services are available to organizations and agencies outside of the UW with the addition of an overhead charge.
Our Mission
IAE is dedicated to the improvement of educational practice through assessment of teaching and learning and through evaluation and support of educational programs and services.
Our Values
- Professional Integrity: We carry out our responsibilities
ethically and in accordance with the standards of our professions. - Accuracy: We hold ourselves to the highest standards of accuracy, reliability,
and validity in providing information and services to our clients inside
and outside the University. To this end, we value systematic quality
control, clear verbal and written communication, thorough training,
and continuous improvement of workflow practices. - Innovation: We value creativity, flexibility, and resourcefulness in our daily work.
We both create and use new knowledge, approaches, and solutions. - Collaboration: We work together and with others to capitalize on our diversity of
skills and knowledge, to share ideas and workload, and to draw on each
other’s personal strengths. - Positive Workplace: We strive for fairness, shared decision-making, respect for diversity, sensitivity toward others, and humor in our workplace.
Our Guidelines on Acceptable AI Use
In line with the University of Washington’s Generative Artificial Intelligence General Use Guidelines, IAE adopted acceptable use guidelines in July 2025 to align our mission and values with available AI tools. For these guidelines, we define Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a Large Language Model (LLM) trained on massive amounts of data and accessed through a browser or in-application interface. Examples of LLMs include ChatGPT, Co-Pilot, Gemini, and Midjourney. These applications create text, images, videos, and other content based on the data they are trained on and prompted with.
Generative AI can be used to provide sentiment analysis and summarize large amounts of qualitative and quantitative data. However, IAE does not and will not use generative AI to supplant human-driven analysis of data in any of our work. Given documented validity and equity concerns about models trained on biased data, models hallucinating and fabricating results, and long-term data security, IAE restricts usage of AI in the following ways:
- IAE never uses generative AI as the sole analytical tool.
- IAE only submits non-sensitive data to AI models.
- IAE only uses AI products that have an established contract with the University which includes adequate restrictions/data protections that comply with federal, state, and local law as well as UW guidelines.
- IAE only uses AI to subsequently confirm and compare the results of human-driven analysis.