The department elected to suspend outcomes assessment for 1992-93 because of ongoing administrative and curricular restructuring. Assessment was resumed in 1993-94. All knowledge and skill goals except knowledge area 4 are currently assessed for Chinese majors. Majors in both areas are asked to read and translate previously unseen passages. Japanese majors demonstrate their ability to speak and comprehend Japanese by answering questions about their translation passages.
Chinese majors participate in an oral interview.
To assess students' achievement of the program's knowledge and skill goals, specially-written questions are embedded in the final exams of advanced courses. For each course, two faculty members other than the course instructor evaluates majors' answers to these assessment questions. Definite deficiencies were noted in the 1989-90 exam of Chinese majors, reflecting problems that had already been noticed in other contexts. 1990-91 performance was definitely improved. To test Skill 1, a previously unseen passage in Japanese was presented to the students for them to read without the use of a dictionary.