Assessment Details
Academic Year: 2021-2022 Level: Undergraduate
Campus Department: Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences [UG and Grad]
Program Type: Core [UG]
Program Name: Mathematics Core (Link)
Description of Data Collection:
The department’s procedure is to collect evidence in two ways, direct and indirect.
(1) The Undergraduate Committee will periodically review final exams in specifically identified courses and rate carefully chosen problems with regard to the learning goals.
(2) The Undergraduate Committee will review student evaluations for those identified courses. If possible, instructors will be asked to add extra questions, designed by the Committee, to directly address the learning goals.
Review Process:
The department’s Undergraduate Committee, chaired by the Assistant Chair for Undergraduates, is charged with assessment. The committee reviews the data described in item 3 during the fall semester, with the goal of recommendations to the full department in the spring.
Resulting Program Changes:
Our department assessment process has been dormant since the beginning of the pandemic, so no significant permanent changes were made to our core offerings this
year.
In spring, Prof. Avner Ash taught a new core mathematics course, MATH1702The Making of the Moral Mind: Mathematics,” in the Enduring Questions format of the Core Renewal program (together with Prof. Ryan Patrick Hanley in Political Science). Here is a brief course description: The world we live in now has been profoundly shaped by mathematical theories and technological practices, for good or for evil. Our moral world is equally or more ambiguous. How did it get that way? Boston College students will work to understand this, studying the development, in the 1600s, of algebra and calculus, physical science, morality and politics, especially at the hands of some of the main thinkers who contributed fundamentally to all of these areas, especially Descartes, Pascal and Leibniz. They will bring the historical study into focus through our
modern predicament. Prof. Ash reports: My course also brought the mathematics up to date with discussions of modern algebra and number theory. The course was partly a typical mathematics core course, with problem sets and exams, and partly a philosophy of mathematics course with class discussions and essays. There were no prerequisites for the course. I think most of the students learned a tremendous amount of difficult mathematics, although not all of them were happy about it. They also learned how to read philosophical texts and how to think about the matters outlined in the course description.”
Date of Most Recent Program Review:
Our department assessment process has been dormant since the beginning of the pandemic, so no significant permanent changes were made to our core offerings this
year.
In spring, Prof. Avner Ash taught a new core mathematics course, MATH1702The Making of the Moral Mind: Mathematics,” in the Enduring Questions format of the Core Renewal program (together with Prof. Ryan Patrick Hanley in Political Science). Here is a brief course description: The world we live in now has been profoundly shaped by mathematical theories and technological practices, for good or for evil. Our moral world is equally or more ambiguous. How did it get that way? Boston College students will work to understand this, studying the development, in the 1600s, of algebra and calculus, physical science, morality and politics, especially at the hands of some of the main thinkers who contributed fundamentally to all of these areas, especially Descartes, Pascal and Leibniz. They will bring the historical study into focus through our
modern predicament. Prof. Ash reports: My course also brought the mathematics up to date with discussions of modern algebra and number theory. The course was partly a typical mathematics core course, with problem sets and exams, and partly a philosophy of mathematics course with class discussions and essays. There were no prerequisites for the course. I think most of the students learned a tremendous amount of difficult mathematics, although not all of them were happy about it. They also learned how to read philosophical texts and how to think about the matters outlined in the course description.”
Attachments (if available)