Ultimate Questions / Ultimate Questions: Philosophy / Course Design Materials / Artifact and Assessment

Artifact and Assessment

All Ultimate Questions: Philosophy courses must include an assignment or set of assignments resulting in an artifact that can be utilized for university assessment of the Core SLOs. 

Faculty should focus on designing an assignment or set of assignments that demonstrates achievement of the Ultimate Questions: Philosophy Core component learning outcomes. Through successful achievement of these learning outcomes, the course will have achieved the related Core SLOs in the way intended in this component area.

General information about assessment for the University Core may be found here.

• Artifacts must demonstrate achievement of the Core component learning outcomes as outlined in the Core document. For both theology and philosophy, these component learning outcomes can be thought of under the following three categories:

  • Content: students must articulate core principles and key ideas that ground and are prevalent in Catholic philosophical and theological discourse and should demonstrate an awareness of how these principles and ideas cohere in a system or tradition.

  • Method: students must show that they have absorbed a rudimentary understanding of the method in the discipline of philosophy or the discipline of theology; this pertains to the evaluation and potentially the formulation of arguments (in philosophy) as well as to the careful, accurate, contextual, and charitable reading of texts (in philosophy and theology).

  • Reflection: students must describe with clarity their own views, put them in dialogue with the views of others, and explain why they hold to such a viewpoint.

• Artifacts should follow the particular guidelines provided in the course-specific syllabus template (e.g., the template for SERV 1000, THEO 1600, CORE 1705, PHIL 1700, HCE 1700, etc.).

• Always remember: the Ultimate Questions artifacts demonstrate achievement of the UQ:P or UQ:T Core component learning outcomes, but these component learning outcomes constitute a significant part of the students' achievement of Core Student Learning Outcome #1: Students will be able to examine their actions and vocations in dialogue with the Catholic, Jesuit tradition.

  • Think of the UQ Artifacts as demonstrating that students know important things about the Catholic, Jesuit tradition and its modes of inquiry in philosophical and theological study and meditation and as showing that they can come into fruitful dialogue with it as they wrestle with their own views on ultimate, enduring, fundamental questions.

• Artifacts should not run more than 10 pages but can be substantially shorter.

• Artifacts can consist of a single, composite assignment, or they can consist of several smaller assignments.

• The syllabus should clearly identify which assignment or assignments constitute the UQ artifact for purposes of university assessment of the Core.

What Works Well

The first round of assessment of SLO 1 revealed some types of artifact designs that worked well and resulted in artifacts that were suitable for assessment of the areas of SLO 1 touched upon in Ultimate Questions courses. In general, these artifacts had the following characteristics:

• asked students to engage something concrete and identifiable as part of the Catholic, Jesuit tradition, such as a Catholic mass, the Mission Statement of the university, Ignatius' First Principle and Foundation, or a small body of texts that included Catholic thinkers;

• asked students to address more than one ultimate question;

• asked students to analyze texts and/or arguments;  

• asked students to reflect in relationship to what they are analyzing and/or provide a broader, separate reflection on how they view and relate to the Catholic, Jesuit tradition;

• involved an element of synthesis, giving them opportunity to make some connection between texts, between practice and intellectual position, or between stances on different ultimate questions, thereby enabling them to realize how an intellectual or religious tradition functions.

Insufficient Artifact Assignments

• Spiritual Autobiographies -- personal accounts of a student's own beliefs may be part of the artifact but cannot be the whole of the artifact. Students must engage the Catholic tradition and come into dialogue with it in the artifact, not just express their own spiritual journey.

• Analysis of Two Different Views on a Philosophical Question -- such analyses may be part of the artifact and can be excellent ways of showing that students understand philosophical argumentation. Make sure the student is engaging in some form a key idea or argument in the Catholic philosophical tradition, and make sure they have opportunity to express and argue for their own view too.

• Report on a Catholic Theological Position -- such a report can and should be part of an UQ:T artifact, but this report does not meet all the requirements of the artifact. Make sure students have the opportunity both to demonstrate in their report an awareness of theological methods of analysis and reading (in Scripture, in major texts of the tradition) and to reflect on their own view in dialogue with this position.