Welcome to USD's Core Curriculum Website!
The Core Curriculum Mission
The USD Core Curriculum fosters the pursuit of knowledge through active student and faculty participation in a broad and richly diverse academic experience. The Core develops indispensable competencies, explores traditions of thought and belief, and probes the horizons of the liberal arts and the diversity of human experience. The Core promotes critical appreciation of truth, goodness, and beauty in the context of engagement with the Catholic intellectual tradition and diverse faith communities. The Core instills habits of thought and action which will serve all students in their academic majors and throughout their lives as reflective citizens of the world.
On the following pages, you will find the following resource information about the core curriculum at USD:
- Division Outcomes for each division in the core curriculum: written competency, logic, mathematics, second language competency, traditions in philosophy, theology, and religious studies, horizons of the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, and the diversity of human experience. Each of these sets of outcomes help guide assessments shared by academic divisions.
- Committee members listed by name and by contact information. Each can provide information about the core curricular review process. Additionally, the section of the website provides access only to committee members to review current and past proposal decisions and materials.
- Current course lists which identify all core courses, D courses, and W courses that have been reviewed by the committee for the College of Arts and Sciences, and for the School of Business Administration.
- Core Assessment section lists a plan overview, which describes a chronological process identifying critical phases of the assessment plan, the plan outline, which provides guidelines, a sample, and a blank table form to guide departments through various steps of assessment (table and sample are also in easily downloadable formats), and literature links, which provides access to various readings about curricular assessment.
- Forms and Checklists which provides an array of forms used throughout the core curricular review and advising process. There are also lists of criteria the faculty will need to know when constructing D and W proposals.
