Mansfield University Home PageThe General Education Portfolio Requirement has been eliminated
For four years (2003-04, 2004-05, 2005-06, and 2006-07), the Undergraduate Catalog describes a General Education Portfolio requirement. These portfolios were designed to provide the faculty with evidence that could be used to assess whether our General Education program was meeting its goals for student learning outcomes (see pages 95-99 of the 2006 catalog). In late spring, 2006 -- after the current catalog had gone to press -- the University Senate approved a recommendation to change this method of data collection. President Loeschke has accepted this recommendation, and so it is now official policy. Effective September 2006, students are no longer required to submit General Education Portfolios. Artifacts for General Education assessment will be gathered in another way.
Although portfolios from individual students are no longer the focus of the assessment process, our General Education goals have not changed: To make Mansfield's General Education program as strong as it can be. Critical thinking, problem solving, analysis, and communication, as well as substantial introductions to several ways of thinking about the world (humanities, languages and literatures, mathematics, natural sciences, and social sciences) are still at the very heart of a liberal education. These are the best preparation for the changing and challenging world that you will enter when you leave MU, and the Mansfield faculty and staff remain fully committed to help you be ready.
This rest of this page is intended to answer common questions about this change in the graduation requirements.
Q: Do I have to submit a General Education Portfolio?
A: No.
Q: Does this mean that I can’t graduate?
A: No. Portfolios were never a mechanism for "grading" individual students.
Q: Does removing the requirement mean that we have stopped assessing our General Education program?
A: Absolutely not! We are changing the mechanism for collecting artifacts, but we are fully committed to continuous improvement in our General Education program. In fact, the same types of artifacts will continue to be collected for assessment, but on a per-class basis rather than a per-student basis. As you know, the syllabus for each General Education course should identify which GenEd learning outcomes are addressed by the course (if you don't see them, ask your professor). Every year, instructors will collect artifacts in a number of these courses, and these will be evaluated to determine whether the identified learning outcomes are being achieved. This, in turn, will give us information that will help us continuously improve our General Education programs