The Association of American Colleges and Universities today released a statement arguing that efforts to hold colleges accountable should measure student learning broadly, and not rely too heavily on standardized tests.

The association, which promotes undergraduate liberal education, issued a similar statement in 2004, at a time when the Bush administration and members of Congress were discussing the creation of a national system for holding colleges accountable for the performance of their students.

At a press conference held today, the association’s president, Carol Geary Schneider, said its board felt compelled to issue an updated version of the statement because it is concerned that some state governments and colleges are moving to adopt standardized-test-based accountability measures that it regards as too “shallow.”

“While many policy leaders are rushing to adopt accountability systems that rely solely on standardized-test results, we have lost sight of the more important goal — providing all college students the full set of knowledge, skills, and capacities they need,” Ms. Schneider said in a written statement issued along with the report.

“Reliance on any one single test will provide a false certainty to students, institutions, and policy makers,” Ms. Schneider said. “If we really care about our society’s and our students’ future success, we must adopt assessment and accountability systems that include multiple measures and that deepen learning even as they document achievement at the highest levels.”

Debra Humphreys, a spokeswoman for the association, said some members of her organization have been expressing concern about the central role that standardized tests play in the Voluntary System of Accountability program, an effort to measure and compare the performance of colleges developed in 2006 by the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. (More than 300 colleges have signed on.)

At today’s press conference, Ms. Schneider described the Voluntary System of Accountability as valuable but said broader measures of learning were needed. Her organization’s statement, “Our Students’ Best Work: a Framework for Accountability Worthy of Our Mission,” offers guidelines for colleges to develop their means of measuring how well students have learned various skills and mastered areas of specialization over time. —Peter Schmidt