Abstract
This paper uses the department’s capstone course to examine how four curricular changes impacted student learning. Adopting methodology from the literature, student transcripts are used to discover the curricular paths to the capstone; syllabi are used to discern the skills that students should have acquired along that path; and then the capstone projects themselves are assessed. Using data from Spring 2016 to Spring 2019, I find that students were not following the intended curricular path, and that the intended curricular path did not seem to impact the quality of final capstone projects. Instead, student learning was heavily driven by the faculty’s commitment to a shared goal of black political science and individual differences in how faculty defined good work.
