First year students at Michigan Tech are currently taking what has been determined as the General Education Core. The required classes in this core were selected by the university’s General Education Council by the process of proposals, discussions and votes all the way up to the University president.

Currently, the council is following the same process to, as Christa Walck, associate provost and chair of the General Education Council, said, “be more intentional with how courses get on the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) list so that they are defining the University Student Learning Goals.”

The University’s eight learning goals include: disciplinary knowledge, knowledge of the physical and natural world, global literacy and knowledge of human culture, critical and creative thinking, communication, information literacy, technology and values and civil engagement.

The goals that the council are working on assessing in the HASS courses are global literacies and knowledge of the human culture and critical, communication, critical and creative thinking, and values and civic engagement.

According to Walck, first year students and seniors take the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) approximately every three years. Results from this survey have shown that students at Tech are not as prepared for understanding global literacies as other students. These results have motioned the need for assessment of the HASS courses.

Although the council is working on making a proposal to change the HASS credits so the list will be more specific to the goals, the process is long; approximately two years, according to Walck.

First the General Education Council proposes changes, then the proposal is sent to the dean’s council. The dean’s council distributes the proposal to their units and then they vote. After the deans vote, the proposal goes to the university senate where it is sent to the committee. If the senate votes to approve the proposal, it goes to the provost. After all of these steps, the university president also gets to vote.

“An advantage to the system is that there is a lot of opportunity for faculty input and two voting opportunities,” Walck said.

The proposal for changing the core of general education was already improved and is currently being implemented. The HASS proposal is still in the early proposal stage.

“If the proposal is passed this year, then next October it would go through the process, but the changes would not be implemented until the school year 2015-16. The HASS changes will only affect the incoming students of that year,” Walck said.

“[Although any changes would not affect me], I think that having the HASS credits broken down into more focused sections would be easier to determine where to go when choosing which ones to take,” said David Cargo, a fourth year student.

Although curriculum changes are being made constantly, the changes have purposeful reasoning behind them. Walck said that the university’s accreditation process from the Higher Learning Community requires them to make learning goals for all programs and assess them.

With the current changes to the general education program and proposals for change to the Hass credits, faculty have been training to better assess their classes based on the eight learning goals set by the university.

“We are using a set of rubrics for assessment that are used nationally and adapting them. Although we are required to have learning goals and to assess them, our goal is to improve student learning because we really care about it,” Walck said.