In 1991, the New Jersey Board of Higher Education's College Outcomes Evaluation Program (COEP) was canceled due to lack of state funding. Despite the cancellation, 17 community colleges formed the New Jersey County College Project on General Education to develop goals, objectives, and assessment criteria for general education. The Project grounds its efforts in the ideas of Lion F. Gardiner. Gardiner argues that in assessment planning, the first component of a successful course program should be the outcomes, or the student knowledge, skills, and achievements that are desired. Then, processes (i.e., courses, classroom techniques, and lab experiments) can be devised to achieve the goals, and inputs (i.e., human and nonhuman resources) can be acquired. Using this process for planning chemistry courses, the following two outcome objectives were developed and revised: (1) the student will exhibit an understanding of the scientific method: observe, make inference, classify and organize information, analyze and synthesize data, draw conclusions, and communicate those conclusions in writing; and (2) the student will be able to utilize information from the enormous and rapidly expanding chemical literature, both in libraries and in on-line interactive databases. The key to a positive and successful outcomes assessment program is a clear set of objectives and ownership and control by faculty and by local institutions. Contains 11 references. (TGI)