Assessment Is Wicked Good #CurriculumThatCounts
Learning outcomes are the "knowledge, skills, attitudes, and habits of mind that students take with them from a learning experience" (Suskie, 2018, p. 41). Institutional Learning Outcomes (ILOs) are the marketable and life skills that we, as a college community, have determined to be essential for students' future success.
We recognize that the knowledge represented in our ILOs develops through intentional, guided, and iterative experiences across disciplines and programs throughout students’ time in college, from the first semester to the last. By measuring ILOs, we can strengthen the student learning experience to ensure that students are prepared to leave GCC able to meet the educational and professional challenges that await them.
As we prepare for the implementation of the Reimagined Arizona General Education Curriculum (AGEC) in Fall 2026, we are aligning our ILOs to serve as direct measures of General Education within AGEC-designated courses.
In this section of the GAUCHO site, you will find:
Institutional Assessment. Our ILO assessment timeline and the path to assessing General Education under the AGEC.
Institutional Outcomes. The seven college-wide outcomes (adopted Fall 2017) with concise definitions and rubrics.
Institutional Report. Recent ILO results—faculty engagement and 100/200-level comparisons—and what we’re watching next.
Faculty Guide to Assessing ILOs. Step-by-step resources for making an ILO Commitment, assessing in Canvas Outcomes, and accessing data.
Fall 2017 — ILOs Adopted 🧭
GCC formally adopts seven Institutional Learning Outcomes (ILOs), replacing previous outcomes.
Establishes a framework for authentically assessing higher-order skills across the college.
Spring 2018 — Course-to-ILO Mapping Begins 🗺️
Faculty begin mapping all GCC courses to ILOs.
Mapping refreshed in Spring 2022 when all rubrics were complete.
Spring 2019 — First Two ILO Rubrics Launched 📚 📊
Launch of Information Literacy and Quantitative Reasoning & Analysis rubrics.
Creation of an ILO resource page with rubrics, guides, and short videos.
Spring 2020 — Next Three ILO Rubrics Launched 🧰 💡 🌍
Launch of Career Goals & Workplace Skills, Critical & Creative Thinking, and Diversity Awareness & Appreciation rubrics.
Receipt of HLC peer reviewer feedback emphasizing a need to directly assess our General Education program.
Spring 2021 — Final Two ILO Rubrics Launched 💬 🌱
Launch of Oral, Visual, and Written Communication and Personal & Community Well-Being rubrics.
All seven ILOs are active, and faculty are encouraged to assess when course competencies align.
Fall 2021 — ABOR Announces Gen Ed Redesign 🏛️
Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR) announces that the state universities will redesign their General Education programs.
Fall 2022 — AZTransfer begins AGEC Redesign 🏛️
AZ Transfer announces the redesign of the Arizona General Education Curriculum (AGEC) for community colleges.
Fall 2023 — Ongoing ILO Assessment & Statewide Monitoring 📡
GCC continues ILO assessment while tracking statewide and district updates.
Data collection remains stable from Fall 2021 - Spring 2024.
Fall 2024 — ILO Commitment Initiative Launch 🤝
Faculty teaching AGEC courses asked to assess at least one ILO and student scored artifacts nearly triples (≈5.7k → ≈14k).
Goal: Broaden participation and surface natural AGEC ↔ ILO alignments.
Spring 2025 — ILO Commitment Continues; Reimagined AGEC Finalized 🔀
Student scored artifacts nearly double from fall (≈14k → ≈25k).
Maricopa finalizes the Reimagined AGEC categories and criteria.
Fall 2025 — Program Assessment Launch 🗂️
Programs ensure course assessments also measure Program Learning Outcomes (PLOs).
Course-to-ILO mapping (begun 2018; refreshed 2022) will be re-updated in program context to further support alignment.
Fall 2026 — Reimagined AGEC Implemented; Reimagined General Education Assessment Launched 🚀
Reimagined AGEC goes live across Maricopa.
Goal: Have a crosswalk between reimagined AGEC categories and ILOs in place for reimagined general education assessment.
Updated 08/2025
GCC is aligning its Institutional Learning Outcomes (ILOs) with the Reimagined AGEC to ensure learning and improvement within our general education program. This section shows how we’re making that shift and where the work is already happening.
Since spring of 2019, faculty have scored student artifacts in Canvas using our ILO rubrics. For this preliminary crosswalk of ILOs to the reimagined AGEC, we looked at recent terms of those ratings (scored work only) and connected courses to AGEC categories using the district matrix. We then surfaced “discipline anchors”—prefixes that are regularly assessing an ILO within a given AGEC area. Think of anchors as places to start cohort work, not boundaries; a prefix can appear in more than one area and will change as designations expand.
Each AGEC category in the crosswalk lists the ILOs that most naturally fit today and the disciplines where assessment activity is already steady. We apply a simple display rule (hide very small samples) so what you see represents consistent practice rather than one-off pilots. This is descriptive, not prescriptive: it reflects current evidence and will refresh as faculty continue assessing and as designations are finalized.
A few Reimagined AGEC items are still coming online. Oral Communication assessment is active in Communication courses now and will move under OCM as those designations are issued. Institutions in the Americas will appear as colleges adopt the new category. We also include Additional ILO Considerations below to note areas with lighter use of our current ILO rubrics—Creative Thinking, Visual Communication, Career Goals & Workplace Skills, and Personal & Community Well-Being—so we can decide whether to integrate them into other outcomes or strengthen them through targeted cohort work.
Updated 08/2025
Written Communication (WCM)
Previous AGEC category: First-Year Composition
ILO alignment: Written Communication (primary), Information Literacy (secondary)
Discipline anchors: ENG
Oral Communication (OCM)
Previous AGEC category: New
ILO alignment: Oral Communication
Discipline anchors: COM
Quantitative Reasoning (QNR)
Previous AGEC category: Mathematical Applications (MA)
ILO alignment: Quantitative Reasoning & Analysis
Discipline anchors: MAT
Social & Behavioral Sciences (SCB)
Previous AGEC category: Social-Behavioral Sciences (SB)
ILO alignment: Critical Thinking (primary), Diversity Awareness & Appreciation (secondary)
Discipline anchors: AJS, BHS, CFS, ECN, EDU, POS, PSY, SOC
Arts & Humanities (AHM)
Previous AGEC category: Humanities, Arts & Design (HU)
ILO alignment: Diversity Awareness & Appreciation (primary), Critical Thinking (secondary)
Discipline anchors: DAH, EDU, ENH, MHL, PHI, REL, WST
Institutions in the Americas (IAM)
Previous AGEC category: New
ILO alignment: In progress
Discipline anchors: In progress
Natural Sciences (NSI)
Previous AGEC category: Natural Sciences (SQ/SG)
ILO alignment: Quantitative Reasoning & Analysis (primary), Critical Thinking (secondary)
Discipline anchors: AST, BIO, CHM, FON, GLG, PHY
Updated 08/2025
Creative Thinking, Visual Communication
During the ILO development process, faculty identified Creative Thinking and Visual Communication as gaps in our Thinking and Communication ILOs. Because use of these rubrics has been limited, we need to determine whether to retire them or strengthen their use, likely within Art & Humanities.
Career Goals & Workplace Skills
This rubric is used primarily in First-Year Experience and, historically, in Performing Arts courses before those programs shifted to aligned course-to-program assessment. We should determine whether Career remains a college-wide ILO or is better framed as a program-level outcome (with targeted use in FYE and CTE), rather than a core general-education anchor.
Personal & Community Well-Being
Evidence for Well-Being is spread across several disciplines and doesn’t map cleanly to a single AGEC category. As we align general education to AGEC, Well-Being may be best positioned as a targeted program or cocurricular outcome.
Updated 08/2025