Core Curriculum (36-40 Total Credit Hours)

The purpose of the Core Curriculum is to provide an educational experience in the liberal arts tradition that promotes inquiry, creativity, and critical thinking.

The Core Curriculum provides opportunities for students to develop skills in the following: critical thinking and reasoning, written and oral communication, and quantitative and information literacy.

The Core Curriculum provides opportunities for students to apply the above mentioned skills in the practice of the natural sciences, the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts in the context of global and diverse cultural perspectives.

Goals, Student Learning Outcomes, and Requirements

I. Core Skills (17-21 credit hours)

Goal: The Core Curriculum seeks to develop skills in reasoning, reading, writing, and quantifying, as well as a variety of information and communication skills.

Objective: Students will utilize these skills in order to understand, question, revise, and generate knowledge.

A. Critical Thinking and Reasoning (3 credit hours)

Learning Outcomes: Students will be able to:

Identify arguments.
Evaluate arguments through reasoning.
Formulate arguments for a thesis.

Choose from the following:
COMM 160 Persuasion - 3 credits
CSCI 101 Introduction to the Internet and World Wide Web - 3 credits
CSCI 120 Introduction to Web Interface Development - 3 credits
ECON 201 Q* Macroeconomics - 3 credits
ECON 202 Microeconomics - 3 credits
EDIT 124 Instructional Video Production for Informal Learning - 3 credits
ENGL 103 Rhetoric and Argumentation - 3 credits
HIST 255 Q* Great Debates - 3 credits
HONR 105 Critical Methods of Inquiry - 3 credits
PHIL 101 Introduction to Philosophy - 3 credits [may be used in either Goal I.A or Goal II.C, but not both]
PHIL 102 Introduction to Ethics - 3 credits [may be used in either Goal I.A or Goal II.C, but not both]
PHIL 103 Introduction to Political Philosophy - 3 credits
[may be used in either Goal I.A or Goal II.C, but not both]

II. Core Concepts (19 credit hours)

Goal: The Core Curriculum seeks to introduce students to methods of inquiry and practice within and across disciplines, including scientific concepts and the practice of scientific inquiry, individual and social human behavior, and humanistic thought from a national and global perspective.

All students are required to take one course in Scientific Concepts, two courses with different prefixes in Human and Social Behavior, and two courses with different prefixes in Humanistic Thought, and one course in Artistic Expression.