September 22, 2006

The Legitimacy of Assessment

By MARGARET A. MILLER

Many academic leaders have expressed dismay at the work of the Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education, especially its calls for "commonly used tests or other assessments" of student learning. They argue that higher education is far too diverse to be measured by standardized tests; that common learning measures will lead inevitably to punitive, costly, and unnecessary federal intervention; and that if assessment is used as a consumer-information tool, it will oversimplify a

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