Yet another group of think-tankers, this time gathering opinions from provosts who have apparently been convinced that thousands of faculty who are daily grading exams, reading papers, evaluating lab work, etc. are somehow not assessing learning. Do they think grades are random?

Yes, let's hire more bureaucracy staff. And perhaps we could create a new VP position too. I'm sure all this assessment information will greatly benefit students much more than the hiring of additional teachers.

rpm13 and archman:

I see your point(s). But answer this -- in an age of increased scrutiny and call for accountability, what will help an institution best make its case to accrediting agencies, legislatures, federal agencies and/or other stakeholders who have an increasing level of "say" over what goes on in academe -- a few more faculty who know their respective individual tree, or someone who can see and comment upon the forest? And once you explain what will help, please explain why.

Also, from whom should this information be collected if not Provosts? I ask a serious question. If you want an acceptable response rate, and you need a manageable project, who should be surveyed as part of a cross-discipline effort to determine how institutions (not their individual faculty) assess learning?

Grading student work has lost credibility as a measure of student learning for many stake-holders, who want another way to measure (i.e., Graywolf's forest). Put simply, what does it tell me if Sally got an A minus but Jessica got a B in English 101? What did Sally learn that Jessica did not? The problem with grading is that it is an average of Something, but the Something it not publicly accessible. Moreover, the "unit of control" in grading is the individual student.
Current assessment technologies seek granularity in learning outcomes(55% of students in English 101 understood the concept of plot, but only 25% understood the concept of irony) and use a course or major as the unit of control.
One leadership challenge is to get faculty buy-in for this different approach to assessing sgtudent learning.

Thank you, timlincoln. I was just about to post something similar. Assigning grades to individual students is not the samething as assessing whether the students, as a group, are learning the outcomes you intended to teach them or the outcomes that the department as a whole determined were appropriate for a particular course. A better measure might be whether the faculty teaching the next level course can begin teaching the new material without having to review concepts that should have been learned in the lower level course. Or, whether employers are satisfied that the students graduating from our programs have the requisite skills for the jobs they were hired to do. Or, whether students entering graduate programs have the body of knowledge necessary to be successful from the get-go. An individual faculty member's assignment of a grade is frequently very subjective, based on their own criteria as opposed to a rubric developed to measure certain objectives of the assignment. And, the grade is frequently based on what the instructor knows he/she taught as opposed to what was supposed to be taught based on the learning outcomes determined for that course.

timlincoln & spencersmom,
There is also the problem of defining grades. (i.e. Teacher 1 gives a B to something that teacher 2 considers A level work, etc.) It is also hard to measure where students are in relation to their peers at other colleges unless one chooses a form of assessment that has a national norm.
Faculty are vitally important but unless we can show that students are learning across the board legislature and other government types are going to question why they should let go of those tax dollars for Higher Education. Faculty are overtaxed as it is. Why put another administrative function on their plates when you can hire someone who can take care of all of the tedious work and keep the faculty doing what they have worked so hard to be able to do. Student Learning Assessment is inevitable so the question is: Do we hire someone to head it up or do we form another committee. I don't know about you but I don't like committee work.