Our pedagogical mission is similarly complex. All classes taught in the Department aim to convey: (1) Skills; (2) Knowledge; (3) Appreciation for the Humanities. This is what we mean by each of these terms:

1. Skills. In elementary language courses skills include the ability to analyze grammatical structure; the ability to read, understand, and translate Latin and Greek; the ability to communicate in Latin and Greek orally and in writing. Advanced language classes call on these same skills and also various skills of literary analysis and research. Courses in the culture and literature of the Romans and ancient Greeks give practice in the skills of close reading, albeit in translation; also, the skills of oral expression and written argumentation. The archaeology courses also emphasize the skills of oral expression and written argumentation as well as techniques of archaeological research.
1. Knowledge. Each kind of course offered by the Department seeks to teach students a relevant body of knowledge. The Classics in English courses (CLAS) and the Classical Archaeology courses (CLAR) endeavor to convey what might be called "cultural literacy" of the ancient world.
1. A Humanistic Approach to Thinking. This is perhaps the most important goal of the Department, to expose students to the kinds of issues and methods of approach characteristic of the Humanities, in a sense to change the way students think about themselves and the world in which they live. The learning of the rigorous skills demanded by Classical Studies, while good training for the intellect, and the acquisition of knowledge about antiquity, while providing a foundation in the cultural literacy of the Western tradition, are in fact only fully justified when they are directed to this goal.

Assessment. The nature of each of the goals, (1) Skills, (2) Knowledge, and (3) Appreciation for the Humanities, is distinct; accordingly, the methods of assessing each must similarly be distinct.

1. Skills. Assessment of skills may be accomplished effectively through class participation, examination, and performance on papers and research projects.
1. Knowledge. Similarly, our effectiveness in teaching specific areas of the knowledge of antiquity may be measured through class participation, examination, and performance on papers and research projects. For some courses, such as CLAS 127 (General Etymology) and CLAS 227 (Scientific Terms), pre- and post-testing is also appropriate.
1. A Humanistic Approach to Thinking. This is the most important goal of the Department and the most difficult to assess. The development of this approach is not acquired in a single class– or even in the course of an entire undergraduate education. Rather, it is a habit of thinking that begins in college and continues throughout life. While this document is not the place for a full discussion of the goals of Humanities education, a brief summation may be useful: The Humanities attempt to broaden one's understanding of what it means to be human through the study of other cultures and times. Classics attempts to promote this goal through the study of the texts and material remains of antiquity. We assess our progress to the goal at a number of stages: (A) In the context of the class, through essays that ask the student to respond to difficult and complex human questions. (B) In the context of the undergraduate experience, through exit interviews of our graduating majors, minors, and other students that have done significant course work in the Department. (C) In the context of life-long learning, we intend to assess our effectiveness through periodic alumni-surveys.

Important Note. We must emphasize that, while it is the most difficult goal to measure, the cultivation of a humanistic approach to thinking may be the Department's most important goal. We wish to register our concern that the assessment process not undermine the pursuit of this important goal because it is difficult to assess it quantitatively or objectively.

Systematic Assessment. Assessment of skills and knowledge through class participation, examination, and performance on papers and research projects is thoroughly systematic. Teaching is also systematically evaluated through quantitative and qualitative student evaluations.

Multiple Measures of Assessment. The description of the variety of methods used to assess different types of student learning indicates that the Department uses multiple measures of assessment. Multiple measurement is also implied in the regular rotation of most courses among the faculty. No student is likely to have only one professor for all courses in a given language, or all of his or her courses in classical literature, culture, or archaeology.

Most of this assessment is summative, occuring within the context of course work or at the conclusion of the program. We must also note that the Department is fully engaged in formative assessment that occurs outside the context of course work and that is directed to the Classics program as a whole. This assessment includes (1) Regular meetings of the Discipulorum Concilium (Student Council), an informal but regular lunch-time discussion between students (majors, minors, and those engaged in significant course work) and faculty; (2) Regular and intense Departmental discussion of the curriculum and our goals. This Department meets as a group to develop its curriculum through faculty discussion and dialogue.

Finally, we have an external index of our effectiveness in the success our students have in their acceptance to graduate school and professional school, and their success in the competition for scholarships and fellowships. As much as our students' cooperation will allow, we also intend to acquire another such external check by keeping a record of our students' performance on standardized tests such as the GRE and the LSAT.

Important Note. It ought to be noted that under the auspices of an 1804 Grant the Classics Department has initiated a significant curriculum reform using the seminar and dialogue as a means of course development and self-critique. We are concerned that this process not be dismissed as "anecdotal." Faculty dialogue is an indispensible method of program assessment.

Diagnosis of Strengths and Weaknesses. In general our student evaluations and external checks such as performance on standardized tests, acceptance to graduate school and professional school, and success in the competition for scholarships and fellowships, all suggest that we are on target for our Departmental goals. However, through these evaluations, through dialogue with students, and through faculty dialogue we have identified two areas of weakness: (1) The elementary Latin program has used a text which is too demanding for the majority of our students, who are taking Latin to fulfill the language requirement. We are switching to a text that is better calibrated to the needs of this majority. (2) On the advice of our students and as a result of our own discussions we will encourage more active use of Latin and Greek, including composition in the languages and oral communication. (3) There are too few courses that address the most important aspect of our mission, cultivation of a humanistic approach to thinking. Accordingly we have met as a Department to develop CLAS courses that emphasize the humanistic approach.

Use of Comparative Data. Comparison of data has been made possible within the Department through the rotation of faculty. Students in each of our sub-disciplines are evaluated by a number of different professors. Comparison of data relative to other faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences is made possible through our use of the College's standardized student evaluation form. Finally, comparison of data relative to students at other institutions is made possible through their performance on standardized tests such as the GRE and the LSAT, acceptance to graduate school and professional school, and their success in the competition for scholarships and fellowships.

However, it must be emphasized that discussions between faculty and students and faculty and faculty played a significant role in identifying the need for change in the Latin program and the Departmental curriculum revision. Again, it must be emphasized that for this relatively small department discussion and dialogue take precedence over standardized data in assessement.

Faculty Involvement. It should be clear that all Classics faculty, including adjuncts, are significantly involved in all areas of course, program, and student assessment.

1. Skills. Observation of student performance in class and on exams, written student evaluations, and formal and informal conversations with students assure us that virtually all our students either develop effective study skills (including self-discipline, self-motivation, cooperative work strategies, and good linguistic, critical thinking, and writing skills) or they choose to not to continue in Classics. We can identify specific students who have risen to the challenge, and we can demonstrate from exams and papers kept on file (student portfolios) that students who stay with us perform very well in their courses. Conversely, we can cite a few instances of students who were unable (or more likely unwilling) to perform to the requisite standards and are no longer with us.
1. Knowledge. Again, performance on assignments and exams are the natural measure of whether students learn the knowledge appropriate to the courses and the discipline.

The weakness inherent in appraising student skills and knowledge by the judgment of individual faculty is that those faculty may or may not have good judgment. We are confident of our faculty's judgment, in the first place, because we know one another's minds and because our small student base allows us to compare/contrast our judgment of specific students. By way of confirmation we are pleased that to the degree that assessment of our program occurs from outside the university, it has been uniformally positive.

The most obvious form that outside appraisal takes is when excellent graduate schools accept the students we recommend to them and agree that our assessment of those students was on target. Students from other schools (Berkeley, University of Chicago, and University of Victoria, Canada) have commented on the effectiveness of this Department's approach to teaching Greek. During the past 5-10 years we have recommended a number of majors (declared or undeclared) and minors to graduate programs. We recommended some of those students to masterís programs at good universities. A few we have recommended to Ph.D. programs at first-class institutions like Chapel Hill and Chicago. Without exception our students have been accepted to the sort of program we recommended them (with financial aid), and subsequent feedback from the graduate schools has indicated that those schools believed that we had fairly represented our students to them. One might say that this measure is anecdotal, but given the small sample of our majors we believe that anecdotal evidence is more telling than statistical analyses would be.

1. Humanistic Approach to Thinking. We cannot imagine how to assess this, our most important goal, except by observation of and interaction with individual students. The favored and most trusted form of assessment in this department is discussing the progress (or occasionally lack thereof) of individual students. Administrative teams can bring a list of any student who has take more than about three courses in our department over the last many years, and the faculty will almost certainly be able to speak of their observations and memories of the specific challenges that student faced, of their efforts to help the student grow, and of their perceptions of how well they did. We can speak of battles that we help students fight with drinking, religious questions, questions about their sexuality, questions about idealism and pragmatism, questions about the importance of human life and community and their own place in the scheme of things. These accounts will necessarily be anecdotal unless someone more skilled than we are in statistics can come to show us how to statistically represent the success of such attempts. Our own assessment is that we win a lot of victories in this arena and that we lose some heartbreakers. By our reading student evaluations, and conversations with students and alumni confirm our assessment. However, we intend in the future to supplement this evidence with exit interviews for our majors, minors, and selected students and questions on the alumni survey that addresses these humanistic concerns.

Implementation of improvements based on assessment. Discussions among faculty and students have led us to make modest revisions in our elementary Greek and Latin curricula. Professor Hays is re-writing his elementary Greek text to involve students in more writing and oral-aural activities. The faculty have also decided to adopt a different Latin text. And, we have decided to increase the role of composition in upper-division courses in both Greek and Latin.

In addition, the entire faculty, encouraged and supported by an 1804 grant, are working to develop a new series of Classical Humanities courses that we think will broaden the enrollment base in Classics and that will more directly address the department s goal to encourage overtly humanistic learning.

In all fairness, we must state that these improvements were based on the kind of assessment that has always served this Department well: interaction among ourselves and with our students. The actual data that motivated our decisions are largely (but not entirely) qualitative and depend significantly on faculty dialogue and interactions with students. Some examples: faculty members observe that even good students in Greek exhibit linguistic weaknesses that they determine can best be remedied by more active learning methods; excellent Classics students who have studied both Greek and Latin report that the Latin text is uninspiring; faculty in conversation with one another and with colleagues at other institutions conclude that the Humanities in general lack clear direction and conclude that we should inaugurate a new series of Classical Humanities courses.

So, the Classics Department has been busily engaged in continuous improvement during the 1997-8 academic year just as it has been since at least the mid-1980 s. We can point to three specific major areas of improvement that we are engaged in. The truth is that these change arose independently of the University's demands for departmental Assessment Reports.

Changes in Program and Curriculum. If the changes in the elementary Greek and Latin curricula are successful in improving student performance, an opportunity will develop to ratchet up the expectations for second-year and more advanced students in both languages. It is likely that we will begin to turn our attention to refining the intermediate and advanced language curricula as we see how students respond to the changes we will implement in the fall of 1998. In part as a result of the strongly positive student feedback on the academic quarter in Greece, we are developing a Winter intersession program in Rome.

The immense work we have done in shaping the new Classical Humanities courses will need to be followed up with even more work in refining those courses. In addition, we are determined to involve numerous faculty in co-teaching arrangements so as to broaden the faculty's teaching repertoire.

Changes in Assessment. We intend to develop exit interviews of our graduating majors, minors, and other students that have done significant course work in the Department for the purposes of summative program assessment and to provide an index of our effectiveness in communicating the broader lessons of the Humanities. We are also now developing a real alumni base that will enable us to develop a systematic means of staying in touch with alumni. We intend to continue to measure the the effects of the Humanities on our students' lives after they have graduated as well as perceptions of our program over time. Such surveys will add to the systematic collection of qualitative data. We also intend to collect more quantitative data by keeping a record of our students' performance on standardized tests such as the GRE and the LSAT and GPAs of our majors and minors.