Skip to main content
Santa Clara University Homepage

Quantitative Reasoning

  1. Home
  2. Office of the Provost and EVP
  3. Institutional Effectiveness
  4. Educational Assessment
  5. The Santa Clara Story
  6. Quantitative Reasoning

Quantitative Reasoning

Quantitative reasoning is an essential skill in our data-driven world. We all need to be able to analyze, interpret, and evaluate numerical information to make wise and well-supported decisions in our personal lives, the workplace, and in society at large. At Santa Clara, students engage in quantitative reasoning in the Core Curriculum and many go on to apply these skills to real-world contexts in their majors. National survey data shows that SCU seniors use quantitative reasoning skills more frequently than their peers in other universities (NSSE, 2018).

76%

of seniors report that their SCU education contributed to their ability to analyze numerical and statistical information very much or quite a bit (NSSE, 2018).

66%


of seniors very often or often reach conclusions based on their own analyses of numerical information (NSSE, 2018).

Doodle of a clipboard with a chart. Resources and Opportunities

  • All SCU students have access to the Mathematics Learning Center, an active learning lab with study groups, review sessions, and individual consultations for a wide range of math courses.
  • In the Digital Humanities (DH) initiative, faculty, staff, and students across departments and schools use digital methods to conduct research on topics in the humanities. Using quantitative skills, students map Bay area soundscapes and use a geomapping platform to identify local religious and spiritual spaces, practices, and communities in Silicon Valley and beyond.

A doodle of a lightbulb. Spotlight on Engineering

  • It's no surprise that engineering students put their quantitative reasoning skills to use in every class they take. What’s different about Engineering at SCU is that faculty, staff, and students use those skills to do “Engineering with a Mission” in order to solve challenging real-world problems.
  • Senior design projects address issues like bringing solar-powered lights to classrooms in Ghana; treating post-traumatic stress disorder with virtual reality; delivering life-saving medicines to rural hospitals via drone; and designing houses that create more energy than they consume.

55%

of seniors very often or often use numerical information to examine a real-world problem or issue, such as unemployment, climate change, public health, etc. (NSSE, 2018).

61%


Of seniors very often or often evaluate what others have concluded from numerical information (NSSE, 2018).