General Education & Bachelor Degree Requirements Assessment - Office of Undergraduate Studies

The Office of Undergraduate Studies is responsible for overseeing the implementation and assessment of the University's General Education (GE) and Bachelor Degree (BD) requirements. The General Education requirements are required by the State of Utah and can be completed at other state institutions while the Bachelor Degree requirements are specific to our school.

We assess the requirements in the following ways:

1. Content (Input) Review - Prior to receiving a GE or BD requirement for the first time, departments must submit an application and syllabi for the course. The application asks the department to rate their own course on how well it meets the criteria for the requirement, and, more importantly, to make specific reference to examples of assignments or exams in their syllabus in order to explain their rating of their course. Curriculum committees (one for each requirement) representing faculty from across campus review these applications and decide if they want to forward the course to the Undergraduate Council for their approval. If the Undergraduate Council approves the course it received the designation for five years. Every five years the course is reviewed again to make sure that the content is still relevant to the criteria and the needs of the students.

2. Student-Reported Outcomes - Every course in the University is evaluated through the Student Course Evaluation system. In addition, courses that meet the GE and BD requirements have specific questions attached to them which provide the curriculum committees with feedback from students in terms of whether students feel the course met the criteria of the requirement and whether they benefitted from it.

3. Learning Outcomes - We assess outcomes in the General Education and Bachelor Degree requirements through a set of specific questions that are asked of all students in the Student Course Evaluations.

Two pilot projects are underway to assess outcomes using direct evidence from student work.

-The University Writing Program assessed the writing ability of students in WRTG 2010, which is the main course that fulfills the University's lower division writing requirement, during the 2007-08 year using a portfolio approach and they are currently analyzing those results.

-This semester (Spring 2009), Undergraduate Studies is conducting a pilot assessment of the new Essential Learning Outcomes that the State's General Education Task Force and the Univeristy of Utah's Undergraduate Council have endorsed for the General Education requirements. The pilot requires volunteer faculty members to: select three of the Gen Ed Learning Outcomes that students in their course will achieve, assemble an electronic portfolio (e-portfolio) of examples of excellent student work in achieving those outcomes, and to report on the achievement level of all students on those outcomes. Click here to learn more about the pilot assessment of General Education.