Office of Assessment, Accreditation, and Academic Program Planning

General Education Assessment

Mission and Goals

A UNC Greensboro graduate should combine specialized education in a major with the skills, knowledge, and understanding necessary to be a lifelong learner, an ethical and independent decision maker, a critical and creative thinker, a clear and effective communicator, and a responsible citizen. The character and abilities of an educated person are the product not solely of a specific series of courses, but of an entire process of education. The mandate to foster the knowledge, character, and sensibility of a university-educated person belongs to the entire University, not to a single department or unit. To the extent possible, learning in Minerva’s Academic Curriculum (MAC) should provide students with foundations and alternative perspectives for the more specialized knowledge gained in the major, while learning in the major should build upon and extend the work done in General Education courses.

MAC: UNCG's General Education Program

Assessment Process

In spring 2011, UNCG faculty participated in a planning workshop for the purpose of developing a plan to assess the General Education Program. Criteria included that the plan be systematic (i.e., all stakeholders know what is expected), manageable and sustainable, engage broader faculty, and yield results that can be acted on to improve student learning in the General Education Program.

The faculty-developed process includes two parts:

  • Part 1: Course instructor assessment, where instructors apply a Council-approved rubric to all students' work in response to an assignment that is aligned with a General Education-specific student learning outcome.
  • Part 2: Peer-review assessment, where peer faculty apply the same rubric to a sample of students' work from Part 1.

Results from part 1 and part 2 are then collected, aggregated, and presented to the University in forums to gather feedback on the General Education Program assessment process and to develop recommendations to improve student learning in UNCG's General Education Program. See Results tab.