FYS faculty have a great deal of freedom to put their own spin on the course. In fact, when faculty participate in the FYS Faculty Learning Community (FLC), they spend a lot of time and thought on developing a unique course theme that they can use to address the five learning outcomes of the course.
Regardless of the thematic approach, all FYS instructors follow these course requirements.
All courses should follow these policies and include them in the course syllabus:
- FYS Catalog Course Description
- FYS Five Learning Outcomes
- FYS Attendance Policy
- FYS Recommended Readings and Resources – at least one reading/resource for each of the five learning outcomes should be included in the course. Faculty are free to require other readings.
- Final Project submission (formerly known as GEAR)- Every FYS student is expected to upload one assignment or project they produced in FYS that demonstrates what they have learned in the course and addresses at least one of the FYS learning outcomes. This is a summative rather than formative assignment and should be an authentic assessment. Ideally, this authentic, summative assessment should also be tied to the course theme. CR/NC (students earning NC for the Final Project upload will receive an Incomplete for the course).
- FYS Common Exam -Every student in FYS will take a common skills-based exam modeled on the CLA (Collegiate Learning Assessment) performance task. You should dedicate 10% of the final course grade to this final exam. As of fall 2014, the FYS Common Exam is administered via MUOnline (Blackboard). After the semester ends, the Office of Assessment will work with MUOnline (Blackboard) to get a random sample of students’ exams. (With the previous paper exam version, instructors sent students’ exams to the Office of Assessment right after the semester ended. As with the paper exams, Assessment does not want and will not access students’ grades on the exams. Just the raw data is needed.)
- In fall and spring semesters, FYS is offered twice weekly (75 min per class) or three times weekly (50 min per class). We have found that the course works best with first-year students meeting for shorter periods of time more often (as opposed to a once-weekly class).
- Each course should include at least one High Impact Practice (HIP) in addition to the course (FYS) itself being a HIP. You can find more information on HIPs here.