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Rules of Communication
8.1 Correspondence from Programs and Teams to the NAAB Office
Team members must copy the NAAB office on all correspondence, including routine acknowledgments and draft materials regarding the VTR. Once the team-approved VTR has been delivered to the NAAB office, correspondence from either the visiting team chair or the program must be directed to the NAAB office. Any program correspondence to the NAAB office should be copied to the visiting team chair.
8.2 Maintaining Confidentiality
8.2.1 The team and any observers must maintain strict confidence with respect to materials reviewed, interviews conducted, and team deliberations, including the team’s recommendation on a term of accreditation. The team bases its assessment of the program, in part, on interviews with various constituencies of the program. All individual and group interviews are confidential, and the information obtained from them is for the exclusive use of the team in preparing its report and recommendation.
8.2.2 Before the accreditation decision, both the NAAB and the program are prohibited from making either the APR or the VTR available to the collateral organizations or the public. However, to stimulate broad-based participation, the program is encouraged to distribute the APR within the school community before and during the site visit. The draft and final VTR may also be distributed internally before the accreditation decision, but the report must not be made available in any form to persons or groups outside the institution until the program has received its term of accreditation.
8.3 Public Disclosure of Accreditation Outcomes
8.3.1 After the accreditation decision, the program is required to disseminate the APR, the final VTR and pertinent attachments, the current editions of the Conditions and the Procedures and any addenda, and, eventually, the Annual Reports and the NAAB response to each Annual Report. These documents must be housed together in the architecture library and be freely accessible to all.
a) Unless written permission is obtained from the NAAB, the program may disseminate only complete copies of the Conditions and the Procedures and any addenda and the VTR.
b) The program is required to inform faculty and incoming students that access to the current student performance criteria and any addenda may be read or downloaded from the NAAB Web site.
8.3.2 The NAAB makes available in its office the APRs and the VTRs of all accredited programs, candidate programs, or programs that have lost accreditation.
a) The accreditation decisions for a given year are made available to the collateral organizations—to be published in their entirety in each organization’s newsletter—and to other organizations and the public upon request.
b) Within 30 calendar days of a decision to place a program on probation or revoke accreditation, the NAAB will notify the collateral organizations and the appropriate regional accrediting agency.
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Rules of Communication
