Institutional Competencies

UGA's institutional competencies aim to conceptualize students' academic experience as integrated, wherein curricular and co-curricular opportunities align. Further, these competencies help orient curricular and co-curricular learning experiences to be more relevant to students' overall education, career readiness, and lifelong learning.

Critical Thinking

The ability to pursue and comprehensively evaluate information before accepting or establishing a conclusion, decision, or action. 

Learning Outcomes:

  • Consider, engage, and analyze opposing viewpoints or arguments
  • Evaluate the credibility of information
  • Support one's own conclusion, decision, or action with sound reasoning and judgment
  • Interpret inferences and develop subtleties of symbolic and indirect discourse

Analytical Thinking

The ability to reason, interpret, analyze, and solve problems from a wide array of authentic contexts.

Learning Outcomes:

  • Express and manipulate quantitative information, concepts, and thoughts in verbal, numeric, graphical, computational, and symbolic forms
  • Identify and apply appropriate methodology or theoretical frameworks to inquiry
  • Organize and synthesize evidence to reveal insightful patterns, differences, or similarities
  • Support, evaluate, and communicate conclusions based on quantitative or qualitative data

Communication

The ability to effectively develop, express, and exchange ideas in written, oral, or visual form.

Learning Outcomes:

  • Develop, support, and effectively express ideas in written or oral form using language with clarity and precision
  • Tailor communication strategy, style, and convention appropriately for various audiences and/or contexts
  • Navigate interpersonal communication with respect, maturity, and/or awareness of cultural differences

Social Awareness & Responsibility

The capacity to understand the interdependence of people, communities, and self in a global society.

Learning Outcomes:

  • Recognize ethical issues and apply different ethical perspectives to ethical dilemmas in a variety of settings
  • Analyze the impact of human behavior(s) on the physical, organizational, and/or social environment
  • Reflect upon how one's social identities and roles shape one's worldview and interactions
  • Develop an awareness, appreciation, and knowledge of cultures and communities beyond one's own

Creativity & Innovation

The capacity to combine or synthesize existing ideas, images, or expertise in original ways and the experience of thinking, reacting, and working in an imaginitive way characterized by innovation, divergent thinking, and risk taking.

Learning Outcomes:

  • Experiment and take appropriate risks to creatively solve problems and advance knowledge
  • Synthesize and/or transform ideas in original ways
  • Consider and incorporate alternative or contradictory perspectives in designing solutions
  • Develop imaginative or original response(s) to a need or inspiration

Leadership & Collaboration

The capacity to engage in the relational process of optimizing personal and collective strengths toward a common goal.

Learning Outcomes:

  • Engage and motivate others toward a shared vision through encouragement and trust
  • Plan, initiate, manage, complete, and evaluate a project or process individually or as a group
  • Address conflict directly and constructively to strengthen team cohesion and effectiveness
  • Consider and incorporate perspectives and feedback from community members to inform equity-minded, sustainable solutions