With the first announcement of the plan, the Executive Committee of the Department discussed how to respond and proceed. The responsibility for organizing the Department's plan devolved upon the Chair, who has long been active in undergraduate affairs within the Department. The Chair attended all the announced public sessions on assessment, except for the Oct. 16, 1997 session, which the Vice Chair, Professor William Schroeder attended instead.

On April 24, 1998, a Departmental Meeting was held to discuss how the Department should organize its Student Outcomes Assessment Plan. All faculty and graduate student representatives were provided with copies of the campus- provided material from the March 18, 1998 workshop, with the background document of Oct. 16, 1997, with some of the campus proposed templates for measuring outcomes, with the plan from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder and with an example of GRE score results for our majors. There was general discussion of how to proceed and all were invited to submit their suggestions for how the Department should proceed.

The Chair collected exemplar plans from workshop sessions but also from other Philosophy Departments who had such plans on the Web. The most useu campus session was the October 1, 1998 session in which other units shared their experiences in developing their own plans. In addition, the Chair, while at the American Association of Philosophy Teachers gathering at Mansfield, PA, made a point of attending the session held on Student Outcomes Assessment given by Professor Donna Engetmann of Alvemo College, which has a long history of integrating such assessments into its curricula.

Again, faculty within the Department were notified that the Department would need to come up with such a plan and they were invited to submit comments or proposals. The Chair prepared a draft focusing on the desired learning outcomes and the proposed measurement techniques. This proposal was distributed to the Executive Committee for discussion. A slightly revised version was distributed to all the faculty and graduate student representatives; comments on the draft were invited. The outline was then discussed at a Faculty Meeting held on October 30, 1998 and again everyone was invited to submit suggestions for changes or additions.

• Ability to comprehend complex material.

• Ability to critically evaluate reasoning and arguments. • Ability to recognize assumptions underlying claims.

• Ability to note relevant consequences of stated principles or hypotheses. • Ability to suggest alternative hypotheses to those presented.

• Familiarity with major historical schools of thought in philosophy. • Familiarity with central epistemological and metaphysical views. • Familiarity with influential competing ethical theories.

• Familiarity with current developments in professional philosophy. • Ability to write critically about complex matters.

• Subject matter expertise

• Ability to engage in professional philosophical discussions.

• Ability to write research level papers on philosophical topics a Involvement in professional associations and conferences a Submitted presentations to professional conferences

• Experience in teaching a range of introductory courses

Measurement techniques.

1) Undergraduate Students

• Review individual comments of self-assessment on ICES forms Chancellor's Senior Survey

Ask for GRE, LSAT or other professional exam scores Acceptance into graduate and professional schools

Information from key courses: track how our majors do in Phil 203, 206, 321 and 330, which are also regularly taken by other majors.

Student Focus Group: Use the Undergraduate Philosophy Club along with other sources to identify knowledgeable, involved philosophy students.

2) Graduate Students

• Entry level information.

• Participation in Colloquia and other discussions.

• Preliminary Examination results.

• Second year review report.

• Fellowship review information.

• Papers published.

• Presentations at conferences.

• Focus Group.

• Portfolio (Draft curriculum vitae).

• Track Grad placement.

• Use ICES forms of TAs to help evaluate teaching.

• Track the invitations to our Grad students to teach in other schools locally.

At present the plan is that the Undergraduate Affairs Committee and the Graduate Affairs Committee shall review the relevant results and, on the basis of that review, suggest changes in the desired learning outcomes or in the measurement techniques. These are committees that already exist and each provides the natural locus for addressing these concerns. These committees would provide an annual report to the Executive Committee and the Department. The reports would be agenda items at a Departmental Meeting. The intent of the endeavor is to seek to pay closer attention to data that is already available and to consider how that data may be used. In addition we wish to discover whether mere is other information that it would be helpful and feasible to naturally gather within the regular activities of our departmental programs.

Spring 1999:

Gather the relevant information that is already produced to make available to the relevant committees. I

Request a copy of the results from our majors who take the GRE or LSAT or comparable examinations.

Ask our graduating seniors to tell us what they will be doing and where they will be going next year.

Make a first stab at holding a focus group session for our undergraduates and for our graduates.

Fall 1999:

Begin gathering the information on central courses.

       Investigate setting up a Web page where students could conveniently enter some of the information that we are requesting of them.

Encourage all of our graduate students to begin creating their own Curriculum Vitae and to keep it up to date.

Investigate how far back we could get information on the present position of past graduates.

Spring 2000:

Review and revise the measures and the measuring techniques

V. Support Needs

About the only monetary support we can imagine needing would be to purchase a database program that would readily support web-based utilization; something like MSQL Server runs around $1500 and we would be grateful for support toward enabling us to purchase a copy.

More pressing would be any help that the campus could provide in gathering the sorts of information that simply are not readily available to us. We plan to use the Senior Survey and ICES forms, but would love to discover that information on how our students did on GREs or LSATs was already available. In addition, we could use help in identifying and locating past graduates, both from our undergraduate program and from our graduate program.