First Year Experience at UIS

First Year Seminar (FYS) at UIS is a program of small, topic-based courses designed to introduce new, first-year students to content from an academic discipline while also developing foundational skills for academic success in college. Students take a first-year seminar ideally in their first semester. Seminars are 3 credit hours and fulfill the general education Freshman Seminar requirement. The course may also satisfy a second general education category in Humanities or Social Science if it has attained that attribute through the governance process. Each seminar is comprised of a lecture and lab.

Assessment of Learning Outcomes

First-Year Seminar learning goals are taken from the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) VALUE Rubrics. The four learning goals—Foundations and Skills for Lifelong Learning, Civic Engagement, Information Literacy Skills, and Critical Thinking—are reflected in the approval criteria for new seminar courses. As part of the approval criteria, faculty are directed to develop course-specific learning outcomes that map to the reformatted First-Year Seminar category goals.

During the 2023-2024 academic year, FYS leadership developed a plan to assess the Critical Thinking component of FYS. The final report can be found below.

Freshman Seminar General Education Assessment Report 2023-2024

For questions about FYS, please contact Nicole Hager, Coordinator of First Year Seminar.