Among all the outcomes of a college education, few could be more important than imparting to our students those general education competencies judged most necessary to prepare them for all walks of life regardless of their major. These general education competencies help to provide our students in large measure with those skills embodied in our College mission having to do with “offering multiple pathways for learning what is important to know and to do – giving coherence and meaning to the total education experience (1).”

Defined and delineated primarily within the Arts and Sciences division at SCC, and based upon feedback and guidance from all the College’s academic programs, these competencies comprise the essential building blocks needed to achieve the division’s stated goal to provide a solid foundation in “composition, humanities, mathematics, natural science, social science, and wellness” in order to “create in our students a genuine interest in becoming active learners and productive citizens (2).” Since the 1980s, faculty and instructional administrators at SCC have engaged in periodic analysis of the relevance, comprehensiveness, and effectiveness of the general education program. General education competencies were the focus of a DACUM in 1992. In a process facilitated by an external consultant, faculty from several Career Technologies and Health Sciences programs and representatives from several employers in the College’s service area collaborated with general education faculty to examine the key competencies within general education courses and their connection to other courses across the curriculum.

In addition to periodic College-wide analysis, individual departments within Arts and Sciences engage in self-study and continuous improvement processes related to student learning outcomes. For example, in 1995, the English department conducted a self-analysis using guidelines from Witte’s and Faigley’s (1983) Evaluating College Writing Programs. This departmental analysis involved full-time and part-time faculty in identifying current practices in and appropriate outcomes for English composition courses. The results provided part of the framework for identifying pre-college competencies for developmental English classes when SCC’s developmental education program was restructured in the late 1990s. Periodically, the English department engages in the commonly accepted practice of blind-scoring sample student writing to assess the consistency of faculty grading and to facilitate faculty discussions of content emphasis, assignment types, and outcome expectations. In 2001, the department took the process one step further by comparing the scores that SCC faculty assigned to a set of student sample papers to those assigned by Western Carolina University faculty to the same set of student papers. Analysis of the similarities and differences in grading between the two institutions and among faculty generated rich discussion within the department. Since education, particularly in written expression and the other general education competencies, is a complex endeavor that cannot be boiled down to a single score on a single assessment, it is important for colleges to be engaged in a continuous process of faculty/departmental analysis and exploration of student learning. SCC has a long and rich history of such continuous improvement.

General education competencies at SCC are primarily shared through course descriptions, course outlines, and course syllabuses in the Arts and Sciences division (3). Course descriptions for all course offerings in the state’s community colleges became uniform as part of the statewide conversion to the semester system during 1996-97. These course descriptions are readily available online at the NCCCS link to its Common Course Library (4). Selections from that library of courses which are offered by SCC faculty are available in print format in the College catalog as well as on the College’s website (5).

Curriculum standards for all programs of study are also established at the state level (6). NCCCS program standards for Associate in Applied Science degrees require a minimum of 15 semester hours in general education which include 6 hours in communication, 3 hours in humanities/fine arts, 3 hours in social/ behavioral science, and 3 hours in natural science/ mathematics. The Associate in Arts degree requires 6 hours in composition, 12 hours in humanities/ fine arts, 12 hours in social/ behavioral science, 8 hours in natural science, and 6 hours in mathematics, in addition to 20 elective hours in general education courses. Where options exist in local course selection among general education classes, faculty advisors help students select those courses most suitable to their educational goals. Recommendations from program Advisory Committees quite often guide those selections as well (7).

Beginning in 2004, the College implemented a systematic strategy to further define, administer, and assess a set of general education competencies for students in every program of study. Our goal is to measure in a more reliable manner our effectiveness in this important area of concern. We have sought a means of ascertaining our level of success at engendering these competencies in a way which is distinct from standard classroom assessment. We seek data which is reliably interpretable in order to isolate those areas of instruction which may warrant further improvement.

A series of General Education Outcomes Progress Reports outlines the process over time by which the College has arrived at its current approach (8). Guided by the American Association of Colleges and Universities’ Twelve Principles for Effective General Education Programs (9), the first task was to establish a General Education Outcomes Process Outline, which served as a basic guide in ordering our activities (10). Heeding the guiding principle that, “General education outcomes are greater than the sum of the parts of individual course outcomes (11),” eight measurable outcomes were identified by the Arts and Sciences (general education) faculty. It is our intention that all Southwestern Community College graduates will demonstrate the ability to:

Each of these goals has been carefully examined and discussed in order to articulate five discernible levels of student success in meeting them: Accomplished, Proficient, Competent, Marginal, and Unsatisfactory (12).

All Arts and Sciences course offerings were then further reviewed in order to identify which of these competencies are emphasized in each course (13). While class assignments and course grades, graduate and employer surveys, and subsequent performance of university transfer students continue to be monitored as a means of gauging our students’ relative general education competence, an assessment rubric was designed to identify the relative success of general education instruction (14). As our ongoing process is now defined, workshops and further refinement of the instrument precedes a practice implementation of the assessment (15), then the Dean of Arts and Sciences notifies faculty when it is time to render their official assessments of all imminent program graduates “based on your overall experience with the student with emphasis on his/her current abilities (16).” The results, separable by major or courses of study, are being used to identify instructional areas of strength in having met our core outcomes.

As an important aspect of this process, faculty from each of our academic divisions were asked to rate the eight areas of core competence based on their own perceived level of importance to their students (17). As a result, the Writing Skills competency has been given primary emphasis for the first cycle of assessment, and English faculty have designed a comprehensive rubric to distinguish five levels of competence in composition skill (18). A uniformly applied writing prompt was presented to a sample of freshman composition classes during fall 2005, and the results of that assessment will provide valuable cross-curricular data from which we may focus our strategies for improved writing in the future (19).

These concerted efforts now provide a clearer picture both to SCC faculty and students of our concern for these essential competencies and our level of success at instilling them.