Designing Programme and Course Outcomes
The hierarchy
Outcomes exist at three linked levels. Programme educational objectives (PEOs) describe what graduates should be doing a few years after graduation in their professional lives; they are broad and are informed by alumni and employer input. Programme learning outcomes (PLOs, or graduate attributes) describe what students must demonstrate at graduation. Course learning outcomes (CLOs) describe what students demonstrate at the end of one course, and must collectively deliver the PLOs.
Writing a usable outcome
A good outcome names a learner, an observable performance, and a standard. Use the revised Bloom taxonomy to pitch the cognitive level deliberately - remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate, create - and choose verbs that a marker could actually observe. Avoid "know", "appreciate", "be aware of", and above all verbs describing teacher behaviour ("teach", "cover", "expose students to"). One outcome per statement, no compound bundles, and typically four to eight CLOs per course.
Traps
- Confusing PEOs (post-graduation) with PLOs (at graduation).
- Offering a topic list ("Week 3: water cycle") and calling it an outcome.
- Setting every outcome at "understand" level, which cannot be assessed or aligned.
- Overloading a programme with dozens of PLOs, making mapping and evidence collection impossible.
- Writing outcomes with no criterion, so mastery is undecidable.
Worked example
"Students will understand the water cycle" fails on performance and standard. Rewritten: "Students will label the four stages of the water cycle, explain the energy transfer at each stage, and predict the downstream effect of removing one stage, with at least three of four predictions justified correctly." The verb is observable, the level is application-to-analysis, and the standard is explicit.