The second year plays a crucial role in the development students' capacity for a number of reasons: In many programs, it represents the final year of required language study, while at the same time, second year language study is a crucial link between beginning and advanced language study, with the largest contingent of students studying abroad in their junior year. Therefore, it is of the utmost important to have a clear idea of what kind of results can be, and actually are, achieved by third and forth semester language students. This paper presents and discusses the results of a primarily descriptive study of the learning outcomes of second year Arabic students enrolled at the University of Texas - Austin. To derive these outcomes, we used three methods: 1) examined actual linguistic production of the students generated in tasks required for completing second year Arabic such as skits, oral interviews, written compositions and test performance 2) interviewed teachers and teaching assistants, and 3) administered a year-end self assessment of linguistic proficiency by the students. Based on this data, learning outcomes for the third and fourth semester Arabic programs were written in the form of "can-do" statements for the skills of reading, writing, passive listening, oral communication, vocabulary, grammatical knowledge and cultural competence. There are two primary goals of this research project: The first is to make available a document which represents an outcome-based, measurable standard for the third and fourth semesters of Arabic, which represents in most universities in the US the final semesters of required language study. The hope is that presenting a model of outcome-based learning objectives will spur a dialog in the field of Arabic pedagogy about the merits of such a model, and perhaps bring Arabic language teaching in line with other languages programs that have already embrace outcomes-based curricula. At the same time, the outcomes presented here are a usable, Arabic-specific document that can be drawn upon when designing new language curricula. The second goal is to provide a highly descriptive method for assessing student outcomes in an already extant program. We will discuss methods for collecting, analyzing, and summarizing student-produced data, as well as balancing these results with the experience of teachers and students' own perceptions of their language abilities.