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Stephen J. Friedman, Outcomes, Learning, and Assessment in General Education 291. Think critically and analytically, integrate and synthesize knowledge,and draw conclusions from complex information.2. Make sound ethical and value judgments based on the development ofa personal value system, on an understanding of the cultural heritagethat students share, and a knowledge of past successes, failures, andconsequences of individual roles and societal choices.3. Communicate effectively in written, oral, and symbolic form withan appreciation of aesthetic and logical considerations in conveyingideas.Initially, we planned to rely heavily on standardized assessments, but dueto problems encountered when trying to administer these tests as describedearlier, we moved in the direction of course-embedded assessments.In 1999, three faculty members from the Department of Languagesand Literatures were recruited to develop the procedures and instrumentsnecessary to evaluate a set of papers from the WOI course—papers of1,500–2,500 words in length that were assigned by all instructors as theculminating project for the class. A rubric was developed around threecriteria—thinking, voice, and literacy—which were articulated in such a wayas to link directly back to the GEP outcomes listed above.A six-point scale was used for the criteria: 6=Outstanding, 5=Strong,4=Adequate, 3=Limited, 2=Seriously Flawed, and 1=FundamentallyDeficient. The initial design involved scoring a randomly selected set of papersacross all sections of WOI. However, few instructors were supportive of theassessment, so the first sample consisted of 38 papers that had supposedlybeen selected at random by four or five WOI instructors whose names (andthose of the students) had been removed by personnel in the dean’s office ofthe College of Letters and Sciences. The three faculty members also served as