Philosophy

• Certificate (Not Applicable)

   

• Associate Degree (Not Applicable)

   

• Bachelor Degree 

  Consistent with our mission, it is expected that students graduating with a B.A. from the program will have gained both “Knowledge Of” and “Knowledge How” with respect to philosophy. These expectations are delineated as follows: 

  Historical knowledge:

  • Familiarity with the basic ideas of at least three major historical figures, of whom the following are representative:  Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Mill, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.

       

  Topical knowledge:

  • An understanding of the basic issues and terminology in the following areas:  logic, metaphysics or epistemology, and ethics or aesthetics.
  • Students in the program should be able to demonstrate proficiency with each of the following skills:
  • Critical thinking:  The ability to distinguish between and assess the strength of arguments and explanations.
  • Reading comprehension:  The ability to explain, interpret, and evaluate philosophical texts.

  
  Writing skills:

  • The ability to present ideas clearly and with minimal grammatical and other writing errors.
  • The ability to conduct research in accordance with generally accepted standards within the discipline.
  • The ability to write in a way that reflects careful attention to language, logic, and subtleties of reasoning.

  
  * All core courses have specific, measurable learning outcomes tied to these department goals.

The philosophy program offers courses that fall under three general categories:  1) Liberal Education: teaches the ideas of influential past and contemporary thinkers who have sought to understand the world and our experience of it.  These ideas concern such topics as the nature of truth and reality, the limits of knowledge, standards of right and wrong, the experience of beauty, and world religions.  2) Methodology: emphasizes methods of sound practical reasoning, deductive logic, and language analysis.  3) Application: critically analyzes non-philosophical disciplines.  For example, the philosophy of democracy analyzes the value assumptions behind democratic forms of government, while medical ethics seeks to identify and resolve dilemmas arising from conflicts between medical technology and the quality of life.

Philosophy Department Website

Each lower division core and gen ed course will be assessed annually.  Each upper division core course will be assessed the first time it is taught, beginning fall 2012, and every other time thereafter, unless initial assessment results suggest additional assessment is necessary.  The exception is PHIL4900 Senior Capstone Seminar, which we will continue to assess every spring.
 
Upper division assessment will be conducted by means of a rubric that addresses each of the course learning outcomes and that can be applied to selected assignments (papers and exams) in student portfolios.
 
Lower division courses will be assessed by means of embedded test questions and/or paper assignments.

• 2021-2022

   

• 2019-2020

  1) First year student success is critical to WSU’s retention and graduation efforts. We are interested in finding out how departments support their first-year students. Do you have mechanisms and processes in place to identify, meet with, and support first-year students? Please provide a brief narrative focusing on your program’s support of new students:

  a. Any first-year students taking courses in your program(s)

  We do not have any formal mechanisms in place specifically aimed at first-year students.   

  b. Students declared in your program(s), whether or not they are taking courses in your program(s)

  We do not have any formal mechanisms in place.   The virtue of our small size has meant that most of our majors who are taking courses have taken multiple courses with each of us and can be advised ad hoc.

  
  As you can see, this is something that we haven’t considered formally in the past.  All of us support first-year students by informally reaching out, using Starfish to raise flags and communicate with advisors as needed, and designing courses that, per our strategic planning report, encourage retention through high completion rates.   We are tracking completion rates annually, but we do not have mechanisms developed to support students.

  2) A key component of sound assessment practice is the process of ‘closing the loop’ – that is, following up on changes implemented as a response to your assessment findings, to determine the impact of those changes/innovations. It is also an aspect of assessment on which we need to improve, as suggested in our NWCCU mid-cycle report. Please describe the processes your program has in place to ‘close the loop’.

  We do not have anything formal in place to ‘close the loop’.  

  The full report is available for viewing. 

• 2017

  1) Based on your program’s assessment findings, what subsequent action will your program take?

  • No actions are required at this time.

   

  2) We are interested in better understanding how departments/programs assess their graduating seniors or graduate students. Please provide a short narrative describing the practices/curriculum in place for your department/program. Please include both direct and indirect measures employed. Finally, what were your findings from this past year’s graduates?

  • All of our graduating seniors are assessed within the Senior Capstone Seminar by means of area exams and a capstone project (20-25 page research paper). Assessment results for this class appear above. In sum, 3 of 3 students successfully completed the area exams, while only 2 of 3 students completed the capstone project.

  
  The complete report is available for viewing.

• 2016

  The Philosophy Department conducted a 5 year program review with full self-study during the spring of 2016. Those results are presented in place of the Annual Assessment. Please reference those documents for information that includes data for the 2015/16 academic year.

• 2015

  1) Based on your program’s assessment findings, what subsequent action will your program take?

  • There is a need to break down assessment data more “finely” in our deductive logic class assessment. Specifically, we will take greater pains to report assessment outcomes on assignments more closely tied to each of the learning outcomes, rather than more general information on overall course outcomes.
  • Based on overall assessment requirements, as well as our satisfaction with past assessment results, we have scaled back our assessment plan, such that our lower-division courses will be assessed every two years.

   

  2) Are there assessment strategies within your department or program that you feel are particularly effective and/or innovative? If so, what are those strategies and what do you learn about your students by using them?

  • Our assessment mirrors the kind of assessment we already perform in our classes, so we don’t consider our efforts particularly innovative and no more effective than what we already do in-class, except perhaps insofar as a use a common assessment rubric for our upper-division core courses.

   

  The full report is available for viewing.

• 2014

  1) Reflecting on this year’s assessment(s), how does the evidence of student learning impact your faculty’s confidence in the
  program being reviewed; how does that analysis change when compared with previous assessment evidence?

  • This year’s assessment data gives us strong confidence in our program’s ability to achieve our learning outcomes. The prior year, we only identified two small areas of concern, which have been adequately addressed. This year we have no areas of concern.

   
  2) With whom did you share the results of the year’s assessment efforts?

  • This year’s assessment efforts are being reported to Dr. Thom Kuehls, Chair of the Department of Political Science and Philosophy; Dr. Frank Harrold, Dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences; all philosophy faculty in the Department of Political Science and Philosophy; and Gail Niklason, head of assessment at Weber State University.

  
  3) Based on your program’s assessment findings, what subsequent action will your program take? 

  • We will continue assessing courses as planned. No curricular changes are necessary

  
  The full report is available for viewing 

• 2013

  We are well-satisfied with the results of our assessment and have identified only two areas of concern. First, students did not demonstrate sufficient research competence in two of our upper-division courses (History of Philosophy: Modern, and Epistemology). This will be addressed by ensuring that this topic is covered more explicitly and thoroughly in future semesters, with clear expectations laid out to the students. Second, we do not consider our assessment data useful for Deductive Logic, as a majority of students taking the class did so in order to avoid taking math classes, a topic in which they traditionally have struggled. Predictably, they struggled equally as much in logic. We will re-assess the class in fall 2013, as this will be the first semester after the course lost its QL designation. We anticipate that assessment results will better reflect the course quality.

  1) Reflecting on this year’s assessment(s), how does the evidence of student learning impact your faculty’s confidence in the program being reviewed; how does that analysis change when compared with previous assessment evidence?

  • This year’s assessment data gives us strong confidence in our program’s ability to achieve our learning outcomes. This is the first full year of doing assessments, and so we do not have a point of comparison with prior years.

   

  2) With whom did you share the results of the year’s assessment efforts?

  • This year’s assessment efforts are being reported to Dr. Thom Kuehls, Chair of the Department of Political Science and Philosophy, Dr. Frank Harrold, Dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, all philosophy faculty in the Department of Political Science and Philosophy, and Gail Niklason, head of assessment at Weber State University.

   

  3) Based on your program’s assessment findings, what subsequent action will your program take?

  • We will re-assess deductive logic in fall 2013 and will ensure greater efforts at teaching research methods in our upper-division classes.

   

  Select this link to view the complete report: Philosophy Assessment 2012/13

2021-22

2016-17

2011-12