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Effective Fall 2020, faculty will be assessing only the Common Curriculum tags on their courses. Courses will maintain their University Curriculum tags, until they are retired (probably in 2025 or so) and students under the University Curriculum will still be able to fulfill requirements, but faculty will assess only Common Curriculum tags.

Faculty will not be assessing their own courses, as they did under the University Curriculum. Instead, assessment and scoring will be done by dedicated faculty committees coordinated by the Office of Institutional Planning and Effectiveness. You do, however, need to design and identify an assessment assignment for each Common Curriculum component your course has. Often this assessment assignment is developed when the course was originally proposed. 

You can verify the Common Curriculum tags your course has on your schedule in my.51²è¹Ý.  You can check using the Course Search.

Once you know which Common Curriculum (CC) tags your course has, you look up the CC rubric associated with each CC component. You can find those on our website www.smu.edu/cc

Next, you want to identify the supporting skills for each component associated with your course. These are listed on the individual rubrics for General Education requirements and Proficiencies and Experiences.

Once you are familiar with the CC components and supporting skills associated with your course, you design an assignment for each CC component your course has. This assignment could be a homework assignment, an essay, a research paper, a project, a presentation, or an exam. You want to make sure that you design an assessment assignment that will allow students to demonstrate their level of mastery of ALL of the supporting skills associated with the component.  You should use a single assignment to assess for each component, and you should have a separate assignment for each component. Group or team assignments are not permissible for assessment - they must be the work of an individual student. 

There are two options for assessing the learning outcome and supporting skills for a component. Faculty may either use a written assignment (assigned essay or essay-length assignment or an essay question) that is tailored in such a way as to prompt students to demonstrate all supporting skills associated with a component.

Alternatively, faculty may use objective exam questions to assess each skill. If faculty use a written assignment (essay or essay question, for example), the assignment must be a single assignment.   If faculty use a block of objective exam questions, there must be five questions for each supporting skill and all question blocks must be part of the same exam.  For Oral Communication, obviously, there is a third option, and that is an oral presentation.  If using an oral presentation for the assessment, there must be a recording of the presentation in Canvas.

For questions about assessment please contact Dr. Yan Cooksey in the Office of Institutional Planning and Effectiveness.

 

First, you should make sure that you upload the assessment assignment as an assignment in your Canvas course.

Each semester, the Office of Institutional Planning and Effectiveness will give specific instructions about how to link the assignment, once in Canvas, to the relevant CC component.

Please visit the Office of Institutional Planning and Effectiveness website for step-by-step instructions.