To the Editor:

I am amused by the ongoing debates surrounding assessment, "closing the loop," faculty workload, and the other rhetoric involved ("An Expert Surveys the Assessment Landscape," The Chronicle, October 27). In business, it is common practice to have a continuous-improvement system and culture in place. Whether that is some formal system like Six Sigma or ISO 9000 or a less quantitative approach like TQM, continuously monitoring for quality and opportunities to improve is standard.

In higher education, the culture is much different. I know faculty members who bristle at the concept of performance reviews and efforts to determine the effectiveness of (and ways to improve) teaching and learning.

Some of that is due to the influence of the traditional academic freedom that faculty members have enjoyed. Some of it is ego. And some of it is lack of understanding of how it can work. There is also a huge disconnect between satisfying outside parties, like accreditors and the government, and using assessment as a quality-improvement system.

We are driven by regional accreditation and program-level accreditation, not by quality improvement. At our institution, we talk about assessment a lot, and do just enough to satisfy the requirements of our outside reviewers.

The reasons for this? Resources, time, and the emphasis on direct measures and indirect measures rather than quality indicators.

How do we know that our students learn what we say they do? Standardized direct measures, like the Major Field Test for M.B.A. graduates? The test is a widely accepted instrument that presumes to indicate that students meet learning outcomes in major competency areas of business. It is also used to compare programs between different institutions.

The problem with the test is that it does not directly align with our program's learning outcomes and it does not yield useful information for closing the loop. So why do we use it? Because it is accepted by accreditors as a direct measure and it is less expensive and time-consuming than more useful tools.

We have an end-of-term assessment meeting in our business programs where we review data from the previous term—student course surveys, faculty course surveys, mentorship and peer-review reports, graduate audits, direct-measure results, and any other anecdotal information we can gather. Without exception, the most useful information for improving the program and student learning comes from the anecdotal and indirect information. It is rich in the phenomenological sense of providing great "grist for the mill" for improving quality. Then we write a separate report to satisfy the accreditors.

We don't have the time and the resources to do what we really want to do to continuously improve the quality of our programs and instruction. We don't have a culture of continuous improvement. We don't make changes on a regular basis, because we are trapped by the catalog publishing cycle, accreditation visits, and the entrenched misunderstanding of the purposes of assessment.

That does not mean that individual faculty members and administrators are not committed to assessment. It means that the system does not encourage and support true quality-improvement-culture building.

So we "satisfice" to get by and do what we can on the side to make adjustments and improvements. Like many things about higher education, it is frustrating and disheartening that we can't practice what we teach.

The Academic Quality Improvement Program model being used in the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools is promising. The institutions that use it are ones that have adequate resources to do so. The time necessary for training, whole-system involvement, and developing the programs for improvement is daunting. And it is only being used by one regional accrediting body, as far as I know.

How do we move to a place where quality is culturally embedded rather than an "add on" to our workload? Until higher education as a whole is willing to look at changing its approach to assessment, I don't think it will happen.

Todd A. Weber
Director, Faculty Development
Marylhurst University
Marylhurst, Ore.