University-level competencies help WU excel to ‘high level,’ affects all majors

By Jonathan McFadden

mcfaddenj@mytjnow.com

All Winthrop students should be able to communicate effectively, think critically and be socially responsible by graduation, according to Winthrop’s university-level competencies.

An academic assessment committee compiled by Thomas Moore, vice president for academic affairs, approved the competencies last semester. 

Though the university already adopted general education goals via the Touchstone Program in 2002, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) required Winthrop to adopt university-level competencies during the 2009-2010 reaffirmation process.

“We were treating our general education goals as our college level competencies,” Moore said.

According to SACS’ 2010 principles for accreditation, every university must identify college-level competencies, or goals in an institution’s general education program for its graduates.

So, the order went out.

Moore charged the academic assessment committee to come up with a set of goals that would reach all majors and department programs at Winthrop and compile it in a report he could submit to the university-wide academic leadership retreat on Aug. 16, 2010.

Faculty members chosen for the committee worked on the report throughout the summer and were paid a stipend for their efforts.

“They got a report to me,” Moore said. “I very much liked and appreciated that report and their recommendations.”

After the report was approved at the retreat, it was forwarded to the faculty conference, where the goals compiled by the committee were approved as Winthrop’s university-level competencies on October 8, 2010.

Now, the next step is assessing the competencies at the program and institutional level to determine if they’re being executed properly across program levels, Moore said.

What it does for Winthrop

None of the competencies relate to any specific student or program, but are goals set for all Winthrop students.

“Every program has to pay attention to these for their majors,” Moore said.

Students in accounting cannot expect to fulfill their writing general education requirements and then be done with them.

Instead, the College of Business Administration and any other departments will have to assess whether their students are proficient in displaying grasp of all general education expectations.

“…Just because you’re in accounting doesn’t mean you don’t have to learn to write,” Moore said.

Similarly, students are expected to seriously consider the perspectives of others, understand how their field relates to other disciplines and successfully express and exchange ideas, according to the competencies.

Though no student or major is exempt from the competencies, Moore thinks it’s realistic to know  all students may not meet these expectations.

“They aren’t competencies that we expect every student to attain,” Moore said. “We want students to think about where we’re trying to get them to.”

Still, Moore is confident the competencies display Winthrop faculty’s dedication to student learning across a broad range of disciplines.

Moore said the competencies demonstrate the faculty’s shared commitment in educating not only students, but citizens of the community.

“Nobody who is educating students to work and live productively in the contemporary world could argue against any of these things as important,” Moore said.

While some educators may see teaching students how to develop moral and ethical reasoning or critically solve problems as important, they may decide it’s not their responsibility, Moore said.

“If people in the major programs don’t make it that important to students in that program, what does?” Moore said.

Moore maintains that Winthrop is different.

Sydney Evans, chair of CSL, couldn’t agree more. She said Winthrop has realized learning facts from a textbook is no longer helpful for the workforce of tomorrow.

“Teaching students using the standards represented by the ULCs will make them more competitive and will develop them as leaders,” Evans said.

Now, the university has a faculty-approved document stating that it doesn’t matter what a professor teaches, the competencies matter for students in all available majors.

“I know there aren’t many institutions in the country that could come up with a set of university-level competencies such as these, the way we did,” Moore added. “They’re going to make us better, and it reflects that we are operating at a very high level.”

That level includes sharing educational commitments across multiple degree programs.

For Moore, attaining the competencies has been a watershed moment.

“I’ve never been this proud of this institution and this faculty as when we passed these university-level competencies,” Moore said.