More than a year and a half ago, in “A Pedagogical Straightjacket,” an essay that appeared in The Chronicle Review, I lambasted outcomes-assessment practices in higher education. Having headed my department’s Outcomes Assessment Committee since its inception several years before, having thoroughly studied countless examples of assessment-based accountability models — drawn from across disciplines and from a wide variety of colleges and universities — and having been one of the main players in constructing the rubric for outcomes assessment in my department, I had come to the conclusion that outcomes-assessment practices were, at best, misguided and, at their worst, detrimental to higher education itself.

Since writing that essay, I’ve nevertheless faithfully fulfilled the mandate of my university and my department to formally implement outcomes-assessment practices in my own courses. I’ve also become more disillusioned than ever at the way outcomes assessment works.

Who can object to the idea that we should continuously review what and how we’re teaching? No one. But the way outcomes assessment actually plays out in practice is appalling. Useful though it may be in elementary and high school education, outcomes assessment has no business in higher education. Its one-size-fits-all measurement models, applied without regard to the variety of American colleges and universities — not to mention faculty and students — inevitably saps the vitality and suppleness from the college classroom. It stifles creativity and innovation, holds back the best students, and breaks down knowledge into conveniently deformed bits and pieces. Its most egregious fault, however, lies in pounding the curved, qualitative forms of real knowledge into the square holes of quantification.

Outcomes assessment eats up time and money (is anybody keeping track of how many higher-education dollars now flow into outcomes-assessment efforts?). Outside consultants, add-on administrators, and beleaguered faculty all spend time concocting “master rubrics” and then trying to apply them to inappropriate, specific pedagogical situations.

If all of this bureaucratic huffing and puffing were certain to improve higher education, there’d be no problem. But there’s really no evidence that outcomes-assessment-based “accountability” models — which migrated from the military into business and then into K – 12 education before infiltrating colleges and universities — actually do any good. Oh sure, they make numbers and graph lines go up and down, and give education think-tankers something to cluck about, which in turn gives them more billable hours and conference fodder. But they haven’t made the teaching any better for any of the good — or for that matter weak — professors I know, nor shown up in the form of improved performance by any students I’ve encountered. All they’ve done is spawn a parasitic outcomes-assessment industry — festooned with executive titles that have the word “policy” in them — and a plethora of deans and vice presidents being hired to handle outcomes assessment.

Yet who assesses outcomes assessment itself? Where is the outcomes assessment for outcomes assessment?

Because outcomes-assessment enthusiasts claim their methods improve “accountability,” legislators and employers adore the movement. Who can quarrel with “accountability” — especially nowadays, when every disappearing dollar is fought over? But no matter how carefully designed or how minutely crunched the numbers are, they have nothing to say about student performance in the larger sense — i.e., whether performances may actually be weaker than those, say, of students 20 years ago, or whether performances are explainable by causes unrelated to pedagogy. Most important, outcomes assessment fails to measure what students actually do, later in life, with what they’ve learned.

The best way to assess a college education is to measure what students do with their professional and intellectual lives three, five, 10, 15, and 25 years after graduation. (Several institutions, my alma mater among them, have been doing this for years.) If we want real outcomes assessment, we should close the doors on outcomes assessment and fire the outcomes-assessment consultants. Then we should triple the staff in the Alumni Office. That staff should conduct careful surveys of graduates’ opinions, professional accomplishments, civic involvement and intellectual activities. Make the results easy to read and make how the data were gathered transparent. Post everything on a Web site, for all to see. Only then will we know how well a college is doing its job, and how it could improve itself. A five-year assessment, for example, would offer useful evidence about which specific programs and professors are succeeding, and which are not, and precisely where to direct money and time to improve the education of our students.

Finally, many outcomes-assessment advocates express, in passing, special contempt for the lecture as a teaching method. They argue that the “sage on the stage” pedagogical model has been obviated by the friendlier, less intimidating “guide at the side.” They say that students learn better when they “learn by doing” than when they passively absorb information. If this is indeed the case — if doing is superior to absorbing — is not putting into play what one has learned superior to simply regurgitating it to no useful purpose on a test?

Put more simply, is not a test, especially one involving filling in little blips with a special pencil, merely the flip side of a lecture? Examinations have their place, to be sure, but if we want to assess the outcome of a college education, let us — and “us” means all of us who work in higher education — measure what our students do with their lives.