July 21

Could the Wrong Assessment Kill the Liberal Arts?

Unlikely critics gathered Friday to offer strong criticisms of the Education Department’s push for assessment using standardized instruments. Among the critics were Diane Auer Jones, president of the Washington Campus, who recently stepped down from her position as secretary for the Department’s Office of Postsecondary Education. She and others told Congressional staff and university administrators that the liberal arts, as taught by colleges and universities around the country, are endangered by these proposed federal assessment efforts. Some say these tested assessments apply the approach of No Child Left Behind to postsecondary education, making them both incompatible and counterintuitive.

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Peter Wood, executive director of the National Association of Scholars, a group that has long pushed for more rigor in the college curriculum and advocated an emphasis on the importance of core knowledge, said the current debate surrounding the measurement of learning outcomes is analogous to a theoretical game of tug of war, with fundamentally different types of thinkers and schools of thought on either end.

On one side, Wood envisions American figures of technical practicality, embodied by individuals such as Benjamin Franklin and Eli Whitney. On the other end of the rope, Wood describes more “intellectual explorers,” represented by scholars such as Thomas Jefferson and Henry David Thoreau. This creative tension of ideas, he said, is nowhere more present than in American higher education. Furthering his tug-of-war analogy, Wood asked those in attendance to imagine a Harpo Marx-like figure with a pair of scissors cutting the rope between these two opposing sides, thus representing the collapse of the liberal arts as most educators know of and instruct them. According to Wood, in light of recent discussion and debate from the Department of Education, the mischievous Marx-like figure is none other than Education Secretary Margaret Spellings and her scissors the outcome assessments being touted during her term in office.

The department’s insistence on testing for specific learning outcomes – even in the liberal arts, where outcomes may be less obvious – provide what he called a “severely impoverished view of what higher education should be.” The push to focus on learning outcomes at the college level, according to Wood, are “a distraction and, at worse, a menace” for instructors. Promoting learning outcome assessments, Wood said, assumes all collegiate courses have a specified skill-set of knowledge that can be identified in advance of having these courses instructed. In his experience, he noted that some instructors simply ignore these outcome guidelines and teach as they normally would have done so, regardless of their listing.

“We bluff,” Wood said of some instructors who identify quantifiable sets of skills or knowledge, noting that accreditation reviews typically verify only what a college sets out to accomplish. “We think this is nonsense. We think this is crap. We put on paper what we’re going to do and then do something else anyway.”

Though Jones, a self-professed advocate of rigorous academic assessments, shared some of Wood’s criticisms, she was less critical of Spellings and the department’s intentions. Jones said, when faced with the pressures of assessing the value higher education, Spellings did, what she said “all secretaries are supposed to do,” and asked the hard questions of her colleagues concerning an arguably underperforming system. Considering American institutions are autonomous in nature and serve the needs of their students and not directly those of the government, Jones said accreditation is the most effective tool the department has to assess the value of institutions.

She also noted that some accreditors do not know how to handle or classify certain courses being taught under the label of the “liberal arts.” Jones noted, for example, hearing about a course entitled “Pornography and Victorian Poetry: A Modern Approach.” Not judging the value of such off-beat courses, Jones questioned whether accreditors know what to make of such courses. With accreditors increasingly under the pressure of the government, Jones explained the potential focus on learning outcomes, in relation to the sometime indefinable assessment of classroom skills, can only show the success of admissions officers and not always that of teachers. The Commission on the Future of Higher Education’s focus on learning outcome assessments were “in good intent,” according to Jones, but “shortsighted.”

“It reduces colleges to the least common denominator,” Jones said, who proceeded to use the example of a multi-faceted and specialized biology department. “I don’t think it’s possible to determine national standards for 20 different [disciplines] of biology.”

Jones further emphasized, with reassurance from Wood, that the issue of learning outcome assessments and opposition to them is not a partisan one. Indeed, many Congressional Democracts share the education secretary’s enthusiasm for the approach. Wood also noted that the conversation among the scholars at the event invited to discuss the topic by American Academy of Distance Learning was solely meant to “spark a thoughtful resistance” to this idea of institutional assessment in higher education.

“I believe that demands that scholars in the humanities transform what they teach into learning outcomes defined as distinct learned behaviors is a contemporary de-railment [sic] of what we do – this time the derailment has forced upon us, not by religious authorities, but the federal government,” stated Richard J. Bishirjian, president of the American Academy of Distance Learning and host of the event, in an written introduction.

Spokespeople from the Department of Education did not respond to a request for a comment about the statements from the day’s panelists

— David Moltz

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Comments

The professional scholarship of Liberal Arts is a trade.

Liberal Arts in the 21st century is professional training in academic scholarship. It has become as narrow as the narrowest of trades. It is not about either life or the life of the mind but about the dogma of academic exchanges. Outside some of the natural sciences, students learn to recognize and repeat the terminology and theoretical ideas of academics. As narrow professional training, it should be easy to measure. Just construct standardized tests to determine whether or not students can identify the new bottles that hold the old wine.

Bill Coplin, Professor at Syracuse University, at 7:30 am EDT on July 21, 2008

Outcomes

If you read Friedman we are in a great transition. We have $500,000 homes that kids need to purchase and jobs being outsourced at record paces. We have a no growth economy and failing banks. And we’re talking about liberal arts. we need to come to realize that we will be sitting on that stump studying French philosophy while other countries own the marketplace. it is time to teach what needs to be known and not what we think needs to be known,

Patrick, at 8:25 am EDT on July 21, 2008

Learning Outcomes are necessary in courses for both faculty and students. Students need to know what is important for them to know and to be able to do. Faculty need to determine by assessments whether students have learned the knowledge from the course. Liberal Arts needs to have learning outcomes for students to determine what is important for students to know or be able to do.How do you know if students are learning if you don’t measure their knowledge?

Tom, at 9:15 am EDT on July 21, 2008

What’s wrong with philosophy?

“If you read Friedman we are in a great transition. We have $500,000 homes that kids need to purchase and jobs being outsourced at record paces. We have a no growth economy and failing banks. And we’re talking about liberal arts. we need to come to realize that we will be sitting on that stump studying French philosophy while other countries own the marketplace. it is time to teach what needs to be known and not what we think needs to be known,”

______________________________________________

Pardon me, but some who study and teach French philosophy are the world’s leading thinkers. Who is anybody to diminish the important of philosophy — especially French — in favor of markets � la Friedman? If we are all just concerned about markets, maybe we should eliminate all humanities study and then sit back and watch those markets fall flat, economies crash, and a lot more disoriented, disconnected people trying to figure out how to communicate to sell those widgets.

Art, music, literature, dance, history, and yes even philosophy are vital to the creation and maintenance of societies. It is the competition for the markets and ever-greater profits that promote wars that threaten or destroy everything the humans have built.

What needs to be known? Human beings are the ones deciding that, and humanities are one of the areas that have great value — not just in French-speaking countries. Speaking of which, French is not the only language of importance, nor is English. A lot of German speakers are making progress toward restricting the environmental disasters that have come about because some factories (run probably not by robots but by people, working for companies that feel their profits are more important than the planet.

One hopes the quote at the beginning of this post was meant to be tongue-in-cheek.

Kathleen March, at 9:20 am EDT on July 21, 2008

To Patrick

How does “the market” know what needs to be known? The “market” has become what Kenneth Burke would call a “God Term,” something no one dares to question.

I just read a student essay on steroids in professional sports. He explains the pressures to use as well as the long-term damage to body and mind. The student compares steroid use to laziness, a substitute for real training: the work ethic.

Likewise, easy credit, externalizing cost, sales commissions, the cheating that inevitably results from “market competition,” the ideologically parallel “black market” that can camouflage ill-gotten gains among officially sanctioned opulence is a kind of steroid abuse, a refusal to heed other dimensions of being human—and is laziness. In short, “the market” is supply and demand on steroids, leading to environmental and cultural degradation.

I’d say the liberal arts (as in French philosophy?) should not be a mere parallel to all this. Instead, liberal arts education should enable the crucial distinction between “supply and demand” and “the market.” They need not be one and the same.

In fact, it may be increasing “marketing” that creates artificial scarcity and artificial demand (as in credit card debt). Human endeavor must not incapacitate itself for thinking outside this “market ideology” laying claim to the only knowledge worth knowing. Such is folly, laziness.

Paladin, at 9:45 am EDT on July 21, 2008

Assessment

College professors in all disciplines do student assessment every semester. How they do it is still a bit mysterious. Without a rubric (or at least a foggy idea of what students should be learning), there is no way to assess progress. Assessment needs to be discipline-specific, so there will never be a valid and reliable one-size-fits-all assessment procedure for colleges. However, the wholesale dismissal of the need for rubrics, clearly articulated learning outcomes, and assessment is ridiculous. Unless the academy gets off its butt and develops ways to ensure students learn what they need to learn, we will have only ourselves to blame when we continue to fall behind other countries. The dumbing of America, indeed.

IHE Reader, at 9:55 am EDT on July 21, 2008

Patrick, a very capable, if unintended, illustration of the value of liberal arts. You highlight the wrongs wrought by so many technically proficient, morally, solcially and politically myopic real-world influence brokers and knowledge workers. Can it be for no purpose whatever that the ancient religions thinkers, from so many diverse societies, who cautioned government against meddling in the private affairs of the people also cautioned against greed and waste and usury? Reducing the society to econmics may yield an elegant and often usefuly approach to analyzing some questions, but dismissing the significance all human curiosity, reslish, hope, anguish and purusit that lies outside these channels in the name of practicality and political reality has consequences. Limiting an intidividual’s responsibility to persons in privity, be they co-workers, stockholders, family members, fellow citizens or contemporaries, may provide a gambit to whittle the necessity of considering how one’s actions affect the interests of others down to a manageable, practical, immediately advantageous core, but that scarcely suggests a practice that serves the best interest of humanity. Quite the contrary, the evidence born by mute stones in the desert or in the jungle or beneath the meropolis supports the very opposite conclusion, that heeding too closely to the practical concerns of currying immediate advantage hurries the day of disaster.

Jim, at 9:55 am EDT on July 21, 2008

Manley’s Oversimplification ...

The thesis of Andrew David Moltz is very strange indeed. The prognosis for the health of the liberal arts was very negative with the advent of the G.I. Bill back in 1944, and it has been in serious decline ever since.

There is no doubt that the general purpose of a college education prior to World War II was occupational ... but in a very elitist sense. One (mainly Caucasian men) went to college to study or prepare for advanced training for the ministry, medicine, law, government, and a few other “professional” occupations (manage Dad’s business). Women (mainly Caucasian) went to normal schools (teachers’ colleges) to prepare to teach K-12, with much emphasis on K-8. African-Americans did pretty much the same thing, but they did it at historically black colleges and universities.

In those days, it was thought that an effective undergraduate education for men included programs of study that emphasized what is called the liberal arts ... mathematics, science, philosophy, literature, history and government, lots of language (including Latin) ... hmmm, I’m running out of that which was thought to be important.

But the G.I Bill created an influx into our colleges and universities of mostly very bright young men (sorry ladies) – and not necessarily from an elite class of individuals interested in a classical or liberal education. These young men were intimately familiar with the Great Depression and the War, and they wanted to use American colleges and universities to prepare for a good job that would enable them to escape the financial constraints and crises their parents endured.

And guess what? ... it worked. Higher education in the United States – good business enterprise that it was – transformed itself in a manner that even W. Edwards Deming could appreciate in order to satisfy the needs and expectations of its “customers.” Just by way of example, colleges of engineering sprang up and greatly expanded everywhere, and every former normal school that was wonderfully prepared to train teachers discovered practically overnight that is was marvelously positioned to train the next generation of those who would have careers in business. Business departments and business schools became ubiquitous.

Unfortunately, the liberal arts were discovered to be precisely what they are ... impediments to occupational training. In fact things got so bad that the frantic apologists for the liberal arts introduced general education programs in a last ditch and futile effort to demonstrate the importance of a classical education to an informed citizenry. Check out ...

http://www.amazon.com/Just-How-St...=books&qid=1216651115&sr=1-1

These general education programs may have been worthwhile early on, but they have evolved into programs that are laughable today ... e.g., mathematics requirements that can be satisfied with courses that are essentially high school remediation, virtually no language requirements at all (or language “requirements” that can be satisfied by taking a brain-dead introductory statistics course), and forget about serious courses in history, geography, or government. It is reported that 42% of college graduates do not read another book from cover to cover after graduation.

Dear friends, the liberal arts have been on their deathbed for quite some time, and “the Education Department’s push for assessment-using standardized instruments,” brilliant as it is, is not going to push the patient over the edge. For all intents and purposes the patient is already comatose and those trying to revive her by employing heroic measures are just wasting their time and energy.

P.S. Listen you minuscule number of Swarthmore types, I don’t think I’m talking about you ... but I can’t even be certain even about that. I’ll let Inside Higher Ed readers decide if I’m talking about the Franklin and Marshall types amongst us (and be sure to check Manley’s URL in “Franklin and Marshall Moves On”).

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/06/24/nesteruk

Frizbane Manley, at 11:00 am EDT on July 21, 2008

or is it grading...

or perhaps the problem is that instructors in the humanities are pressured to grade on the A/B binary, since every student is “a winner,” and my future is dependent upon good evaluations from them.

I know what I should be teaching students. But they don’t think it’s fun, most have no work ethic, they aren’t receptive, and I’m simply not in a position to do anything about it. I would like to have a job someday. And so they need to be happy and feel good. A few respond well to actually being challenged. Most get angry.

This is not to say that standardized tests are the answer. At the very least, students need basic communication skills. But how does one test that? The 5 paragraph essay, it turns out, is the thing I spend the most time fighting.

As college is thought of, primarily, as a time of independence from parents and having a good time — with a purchased diploma, which is an expectation and a side-effect — testing is just going to be a disaster that stifles the freedom and creativity of the humanities for the students who are engaged. Faculty need to be helpful and interesting. And they need time to do so. If we respected and funded the humanities (and secondary school teachers) like we do the sciences, we would have very different results. This won’t happen. And we get what we pay for.

Standards will rise when we can stem the tide of grade inflation — and have more time for each student.

— a graduate student/teaching fellow

mf, at 11:00 am EDT on July 21, 2008

Patrick, You seem to be indicating that because the economy isn’t doing so well we should be less intellectual.

You also seem to not understand the importance of philosophy as a discipline. Having a command of various veins of philosophical thoughts allows people in other disciplines to recognize assumptions (good or bad) that underlie that discipline. Alas, if you want your kids to engage in wrote memorization, don’t let me stop you.

Jim, I will have you know that most people that matter graduated with liberal arts degrees. Of course, when talking to the “little people” they tend to bash intellectuals, but this makes the little people happy.

Larry, at 11:50 am EDT on July 21, 2008

Assessment as an opportunity

I would suggest that assessment is a great opportunity for faculty members to express the importance of the liberal arts. For example, assessment could be used as a way to express what students learn from participating in “Pornography and Victorian Poetry,” to support the need and value of such a course as part of the curriculum. In this way assessment is an opportunity to share and communicate how students are growing and learning from a liberal arts curriculum.

Imagine how different an article this would be if it were titled, “Could the Right Assessment Enliven the Liberal Arts?”

T-bone, at 12:35 pm EDT on July 21, 2008

IHE reader makes a number of wild statements starting with “we are fallingbehind other countries.” How? In government underfunding our higher education system, for sure. But rubrics and assessment has nothing to do with state underfunding higher education.

Yes, professors assess students all the time, but to ask for a “rubric,” a one-size fits all system—is to dumb down the system. Professors know exactly what they are testing for, and their tests are more sophisticated than a socalled rubric which usually asks for simpleminded tasks.

In California we’ve been testing for years now, and this testing exacerbates the faults of underfunded k-12 system resulting in 1 out of 4 students not graduating high school. They just leave. It seems to be that the No Child left Behind testing movement has been a huge failure resulting in worsening of the k-12 schools. Now people what to put this failed system on higher education, as if expanding the failures of the testing movement to a wider area. The simple minded testing assessment and learning outcomes will be great harm to higher education, particularly in the liberal arts.

Julia Stein, at 12:35 pm EDT on July 21, 2008

the fundamental flaw

For me, as someone who teaches the early stages of the liberal arts, the fundamental flaw of trying to assess these courses is the notion that the lessons of such a course, whether in literature, philosophy or what have you, is that the so-called outcome should be readily apparent by the end of the term.

If a student reads Civil Disobedience or the Rights of Man or the Declaration of Independence, the hope is that the lessons will be lifelong, that what is learned becomes apparent when the student, or former student, or graduate, can apply the ideas or lessons of a particular text to an event in their life. Just because something is not readily measurable, assuming it ever was, on the last day of class does not mean learning took place.

I often make a joke about our diversity requirement: “Before I took this class, I was racist. Now, at the end of the class, I’m 30 percent less of a racist.” Is that the sort of thing that can ever be measured, no matter how well or how poorly a student might do in any given class? I think not and I’m glad to see resistance to outcomes.

bradley bleck, instructor at Spokane Falls CC, at 12:55 pm EDT on July 21, 2008

Observations and Comments

I find Peter Wood’s image compelling and truthful in all its aspects. The current Dept. of ED represents, in my opinion, an overwhelming threat to the progress of education and thought in the US. I find Ms. Jones need to focus her case for standards by citing a course about pornography and poetry as witness for the need to look at standards for assessment to be disingenuous and a misdirection — if there is a case, it should be made from the general not from a tiny specific — Mr. Wood’s seems to me to have done that by drawing a picture to represent the struggle between different kinds of thought and creativity which represent the life of universities. This newspaper,I believed, carried an article about a year ago that cited the US system of higher education as the one that the rest of the world should model itself on — my memory is that almost immediately after that article appeared all these attempts to dismantle that system began. Including MsSpellings efforts. It seems an odd coincidence.

Christine Sell, Adjunct Faculty at Cleveland State University, at 1:20 pm EDT on July 21, 2008

What can be assessed?

This article and many of the comments made me think. What is the purpose of a liberal ed course, and what can be assessed? Clearly, if I were teaching about the constitution, it might be easy to see if the students know what was written in the Bill of Rights. Depending on how mean I am I could ask if students could paraphrase the 2nd admendment, or to recite it verbatim. However, what did they mean when they committed the words to paper is very complicated. Some of the brightest minds in our nation just split 5-4 on what they thought the words meant. (Personally, I am on Souter’s side, but heck, Scalia is a bright guy too.) If I asked the students to express their views it would be darn near impossible to create a rubrick for determining the “best” answers. I think I can tell which students is the most reflective—but more often than not I am blinded by my own views. For example, someone who give greater weight to the need for a ready militia is “obviously” a better thinker than the student who gives greater emphasis to the right to “bear arms.”

The problem with universal assessment is that it reduces the product to knowledge and skills that we find universally necessary and I hope that never happens. Manley’s view that the post WWII influx made job preparation important is absolutely correct, because as we evolve intellectually, the knowledge and skills needed to do our jobs has gone beyond what we could give students by the end of high school. However, the real strength of our nation lies in the ability of its populace to deal with many of the complex social issues, and I certainly want our universities to continue to look at philosophy, French literature and even mathematics as a way of “preparing” an informed electorate for decision making.

Fred Flener, Retired, at 1:35 pm EDT on July 21, 2008

I can’t believe we’re still arguing about assessment

Wow. Really? How many PhDs does it take to stop grandstanding and answer the basic question that the assessment movement is really asking: How do we know that we’re successful in what we’re trying to do?

Anyone who claims that we can’t ever know what success looks like (using quantitative, qualitative, or both types of measures) is an irrelevant, obsolete dinosaur that deserves to go extinct in this next wave of retirements.

SB, at 1:50 pm EDT on July 21, 2008

“Anyone who claims that we can’t ever know what success looks like (using quantitative, qualitative, or both types of measures) is an irrelevant, obsolete dinosaur that deserves to go extinct in this next wave of retirements.”

Well, I’m not sure that I know what success looks like. Yes, on some level I know whether a student solved a problem correctly or incorrectly, and whether that incorrect solution came close or was just a hopeless mess. But introductory physics classes are fairly cut and dried like that.

Thinking back to more advanced classes, where the real goal was to survey and understand the issues in a large field of contemporary work, I’m not sure if I know what success looks like. I probably couldn’t do the homework problems from some of my advanced classes, because it’s been too long since I thought about the details of the particular field, but the ideas have stayed with me and informed work in other fields in ways that I never would have expected at the time. I’m getting new layers from things that I studied a long time ago, even if the particular details of whatever problem are no longer at my fingertips. I suspect that this is somewhat similar to the issues for humanities instructors.

So I don’t know what success looks like at the end of the quarter when the course is more about examining a wide field of ideas rather than mastering a few technical topics. I do know what the potential long-term benefits are (I’m enjoying those benefits in my own work right now) but I don’t know how to measure that in a course. I just do the best that I can and hope that whatever I ask my students to do will at least motivate them to think deeply about a topic and retain some things that they can continue to draw on in subsequent work.

I probably sound lazy and resistant to accountability, but the truth is that I’d be happy to subject my work to objective measures of outcomes if I had a clear idea of how to gauge whether a student has gotten something that can get him/her started on a longer exploration of ideas.

Assistant Professor of Physics, at 2:15 pm EDT on July 21, 2008

Response from Professors

SB, just take our word for it. We’re successful in what we’re trying to do.

IHE Reader, at 2:25 pm EDT on July 21, 2008

Yes: one Measure of Success

is whether students leave the course wanting to go on learning about its subject matter and connecting it with other knowledge, wanting to devote a lifetime to reading books cover to cover and discussing them with others.

Should that be a criterion for assessment?

Paladin, at 2:40 pm EDT on July 21, 2008

Paladin-

I don’t know whether it should be a criterion for assessment. I just know that over time I’ve gotten new layers from courses in which my initial performance was probably just average. This makes me very sympathetic to the argument that the benefits are too difficult to measure at the end of the quarter.

I still think it’s worth assessing learning, but the people who point to long-term benefits that are hard to measure aren’t just blowing smoke to cover themselves. OK, some of them probably are, but some of them are also pointing to very real phenomena that we’re all familiar with but aren’t necessarily well-equipped to measure.

This doesn’t argue against assessment, but it does argue that we’ll need to be creative and cautious in how we go about this, because some of the very real and most valuable benefits ARE hard to measure. Hard things should still be done, they should just be done with care.

Assistant Profesor of Physics, at 3:05 pm EDT on July 21, 2008

Thank You, Julia Stein!

“Considering American institutions are autonomous in nature and serve the needs of their students and not directly those of the government, Jones said accreditation is the most effect tool the department has to assess the value of institutions.”

Let’s be clear folks, Professors assessing students “may” add value to teaching and learning.

On the other hand the feds push to have a “one size fits all” measuring spoon is for one purpose and one purpose only;

So that lawmakers can rationalize their budget cuts with “scientific data"!

The purpose for lawmakers is to be able to respond to citizens who ask why their education budget is being cut for the umpteenth time in favor of just about anything else that comes to mind, or lack of mind as the case may be.

Rarely if ever have their Measurements resulted in increases to the liberal arts. Sure, business schools make out just fine.

To quote Carlin, The middle two letters in the word indUStry are US.

Pay careful attention to that term “tool". The tool is a buzzsaw. Assess the value of an institution to continue receiving funding, i.e. if our earlier federal budget cuts did not kill it yet.

Manley is right from a historical context, but that is not to say that the “liberal” education has no value. It may not have value to those employers that don’t want their employees to question their decisions, or their treatment of labor, but that is not the same thing.

Credential inflation only applies in those areas where people did not need the credential to do the job in the first place, but it was the only way to get more salary and promotion per managements directives. Now that management has reaped the rewards they are trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Which just goes to show you that eventually some people might learn to think on their own, even if they did attend nothing but accounting courses.

R.F., at 3:05 pm EDT on July 21, 2008

Isn’t that the point?

As faculty, how do we know that our students successfully complete in-class assessments (be it multiple-choice exams, essay questions, or depth of knowledge articulated during class discussion)?

If we assess students’ performance as learners, isn’t it reasonable that our performance as teachers be assessed as well?

Many in the academy are woefully uninformed about the value of assessment in pedagogy. After all, how many Ph.D. programs actually include assessment as a required course? (Come to think of it, how many Ph.D. programs require courses in pedagogy and educational philosophy?)

DSmith78, at 4:15 pm EDT on July 21, 2008

Links to Haywood articles

Here are the links for the two Bruce Haywood items mentioned above:

“Trivial Pursuits” essayhttp://department.monm.edu/history/faculty_forum/HAYWOOD.html

“The Essential College” bookhttp://www.amazon.com/Essential-College-Bruce-Haywood/dp/1880977168

Ken D., at 4:15 pm EDT on July 21, 2008

Jones wrong on accreditation

“Jones said accreditation is the most effect [sic] tool the department has to assess the value of institutions.”

In another 50 years, if higher ed institutions are still around, this statement might be true — but not today.

As others have pointed out, accreditation only really matters for marginal schools, those on the brink of failing.

Afterall, negative “findings” (called recommendations) can go on repeatedly for decades without being corrected, so what’s the hurry? (See ERIC doc below)

Secondly, the US Department of Education is not in the business of assessing the “value of institutions,” or ranking colleges. The historical record after 1911 is clear about this.

Rather — and Jones should know this — US DOE/AAEU is in business to make sure that cash flows unimpeded into institutional buckets.

Of necessity, this primary interest undermines considerations of institutional quality, or the lack thereof.

Instead, national and regional accreditors, and specialized accrediting associations are involved with institutional evaluation, such as it is in this country.

Glen S. McGhee, Dir., at Florida Higher Education Accountability Project, at 10:05 pm EDT on July 21, 2008

Dorn raises questions about venue

Sherman Dorn raises important questions about the venue for this forum. See the link below.

GSM, at 10:05 pm EDT on July 21, 2008

Keep “No Child Left Behind” OUT of college!

Bureaucrats in Washington have no business instituting a “one-size-fits-all” evaluative approach within the sacred walls of our great institutions of higher learning. As someone who has taught in secondary education, I can uncategorically state the harm that has come from placing an unyielding emphasis on standardized testing and quantifiable outcomes. Remember, the whole point in offering a liberal arts education is to enrich students’ intellectual acumen, giving them an opportunity to acquire a diverse education drawing upon the humanities and social sciences, in addition to the more technical, industry-specific skills obtained from the “core” courses offered by their specific programs In short, forcing professors to worry about vague, ill-defined learning “outcomes” and “standards” will only culminate in the stifling of knowledge and loss of vitality in our univesity/college classrooms.Let’s stop this dangerous encroachment upon our academic freedoms NOW!

Mark

Mark, Graduate Student at IPFW, at 10:50 pm EDT on July 21, 2008

The problem of transformation

Over the past few years, I’ve come to realize that many of my students lack the expectation of being transformed. Rather, they think of classes as something they sit through, participate in perhaps, and move on.

I’m looking for them to be transformed in two ways. First, I want them to acquire certain discreet skills, and because I teach French, this is often dependent on rote memorization. Some seem genuinely surprised that I expect them to really learn things (from verb conjugations to expressing their emotions in French to analyzing poetic structures). Rubrics and assessments really help me to clearly define these goals and determine whether I and the students have achieved them. It also helps to be able to tell students, in order to pass this class, you will have to successfully accomplish x, y, and z. Over the course of the semester, some really do come to understand that they will have to work to meet expectations.

On the other hand, I expect a college student to be transformed in how s/he solves problems, understands culture, behaves as a citizen, and so forth. Somehow, I think most students expect to undergo transformative social and sexual experiences (as in _Travelling Pants II_), but they don’t necessarily see themsleves transforming ethically and intellectually. Some of my students who very much understand that they must undergo measurable transformations (by learning concrete skills and bits of information) may initially balk at the other transformations I expect of them (e.g. that they will courageously risk being wrong in public or that they will begin to recognize what makes them American). These are the sorts of outcomes that some of you referred to that may not be known for years.

So assessments do have their place, but are by no means capable of fully measuring an education.

p.s. Patrick, are you aware that the other countries that may soon “own” the marketplace place a great deal of value on philosophy and the other liberal arts?

Dr. K, at 5:55 pm EDT on July 22, 2008

Liberal Arts Assessment

Where is the greatest concentration of part-time contingent faculty in higher education? In the “Liberal Arts” courses, especially at the introductory level. That, Ms. Spellman et al, is the real issue. This business of assessing “learning outcomes” is all well and good, I guess, but isn’t that what teachers do when they give grades? How many checks do we need on our students and who decides what these will be or when they will take place? So what’s up with this testing focus, and why isn’t it universities’ tepid commitment to the liberal arts that really needs “assessment.” In the end, really, one wonders whether there is anything remotely resembling a liberal arts education on most college campuses where “marketable skills” are sold. One senses that those who get too much of a liberal education may be, in the popular perception, occupationally handicapped.

If assess we must, let’s do this. Re-administer to all students who have taken the ACT or SAT, the same test during their senior year of college. Then we’ll see whether they have (gag me) “added value” to their education by scoring higher.

Sorry, but the ONLY folks I see profiting from this testing mania are the for-profit testing corporations which, doubtless, consist largely of Republicans who’ve given lots of dough to their friends.

George K, at 2:25 pm EDT on July 25, 2008

What Do We Measure and Why?

I think we get into trouble when we allow assessment and measurement to rule us rather than to serve us. Here are a couple of excerpts from a piece written by Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers that speaks to this:

What Do We Measure and Why?http://www.margaretwheatley.com/articles/whymeasure.html

“We live in a culture that is crazy about numbers. We seek standardization, we revere precision, and we aspire for control. The very ancient and dominant belief of Western culture is that numbers are what is real. If you can number it, you make it real. Once made real, it’s yours to manage and control.”

“We would like to dethrone measurement from its godly position, to reveal the false god it has been. We want instead to offer measurement a new job—that of helpful servant. We want to use measurement to give us the kind and quality of feedback that supports and welcomes people to step forward with their desire to contribute, to learn, and to achieve.”

Sue, at 10:55 am EDT on August 8, 2008

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