Return to: Academic Divisions and Departments

The First-Year/Sophomore program encourages careful listening and reading, thoughtful speaking and writing, and reflective academic planning and self-exploration. These courses provide students opportunities to develop communication and research skills useful for generating, exploring, defending, and challenging ideas, thereby preparing students to succeed in the Junior Seminar and Senior Project that are required for each student’s major. Taken together, the FS program, Junior Seminar, and Senior Project ensure that all Allegheny graduates are equipped to think critically and creatively, to communicate clearly and persuasively, to listen and respond thoughtfully, and to meet challenges in a diverse, interconnected world.

FS Learning Outcomes

FS Program Learning Outcomes

Students who successfully complete the three-course FS sequence should:

• Become able readers, listeners, speakers, and writers acting in a variety of genres, occasions, and purposes;
• Develop an awareness of audience and its effects on the creation and delivery of ideas;
• Be able to use the ideas of others to advance thinking;
• Understand reading and listening as acts of inquiry.

Learning Outcomes for FS 101

Students who successfully complete FS 101  should:

• Recognize and express interesting ideas of intellectual value;
• Develop an engaging voice as a speaker and writer;
• Be able to organize ideas effectively to communicate in specific contexts;
• Be able to use language clearly, powerfully, and with appropriate detail.

Learning Outcomes for FS 102

Students who successfully complete FS 102  should be able to:

• Participate in a sustained conversation with other academic writers and speakers;
• Generate a thesis that addresses a clearly defined problem;
• Support a thesis with appropriate reading and evidence;
• Communicate in progressively complex and nuanced ways.

Learning Outcomes for FS 201

Students who successfully complete FS 201  should be able to:

• Produce persuasive written and oral presentations that advance disciplinary ideas and conform to disciplinary conventions;
• Articulate or demonstrate how the work of practitioners in the discipline draws on and responds to the work of other practictioners;
• Incorporate the work of others in substantial writing assignments and presentations in discipline-appropriate ways;
• Design, utilize and/or document academic research appropriate to disciplinary conventions.

FS Courses

Note: FS courses do not count towards the College Distribution Requirements for any student.

Return to: Academic Divisions and Departments