January 7, 2009

Liberal-Education Group Discourages Reliance on Tests to Hold Colleges Accountable

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

Comments

1. Standardized tests should be viewed with much more suspicion than they are at present. What they measure is highly suspect – and whether they measure anything meaningful is an open question.

   — ap    Jan 7, 03:56 PM    #

2. “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.”

   Bingo, as faculty and administrators this should be our stance. YES, we need to be held accountable for the learning outcomes of our students, but it SHOULD NOT be through a single standardized test.

   — Kyle David    Jan 7, 04:33 PM    #

3. My sister-in-law hires for 5 to 10 entry-level positions each year for a profession that pays well but demands hard work. Her company gets students straight out of college at the bachelor’s degree level. She has been in this position for the past 5 years, and she tells me that there are certain colleges whose students merit extra scrutiny from her, based upon unpleasant experiences in the past. In fact, there are a couple of schools from which she simply will not hire. These schools are in many cases elite public and private institutions in which (in her experience) students are coddled and never forced to develop a work ethic. Their job candidates invariably present to her transcripts with mostly “A“s and a maybe a handful of “B“s, but somehow feel then can show up for work an hour late and leave early on Friday for weekend ski trips. This type of student seems to curiously use all of his or her sick days each year, more often than not on a Monday or a Friday. Many of them will only do exactly what they are told to do, and show no initiative for taking on non-assigned tasks.

   My sister-in-law has spoken to the career placement office at a couple of these schools and shared her concerns with them. In cases where the career counselors even care about her feedback, they sheepishly admit that there is not much they can do to affect changes in instruction, other than to pass her comments along to the appropriate dean. No dean has ever called her for further discussion.

   That, to me, seems to be a pretty strong way of assessing a college: whether its students with bachelor’s degrees can function in a work environment. I would hope that more businesses start to share this type of feedback with universities.

   — J. Ward    Jan 7, 06:40 PM    #

4. Consistent with the position of our AAC&U colleagues, the Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA) has always held that any single measure of learning outcomes is incomplete. VSA participants select one of three learning outcomes instruments to measure core educational outcomes at the institution level. We emphasize that the selected instrument should not replace existing assessments but complement and extend other measures that are appropriate for the institution’s mission and aspirations for its students.

   As a case in point, NASULGC and AASCU (the sponsoring organizations of the VSA) are partnering with AAC&U on a $2.4 million Dept of Education FIPSE grant to better understand the relationships between various measures of learning outcomes. The resulting measures may eventually be incorporated in the VSA once a common framework is developed. The grant includes work on assessment tools to measure core education outcomes, work place skills, civic engagement, and student work in e-portfolios.

   The need for multiple measures does not diminish the value of using a common metric within the VSA to measure high-level cognitive skills across disciplines. We believe that such measurement fits well within the accountability framework espoused by AAC&U and many of its members. The ability to compare and contrast results, over time within institutions and among peer institutions, provides valuable benchmarking information as institutions struggle with the complex task of self-evaluation and improvement. Further, such comparable information is one of the cornerstones of accountability for our public institutions to our key stakeholders.

   David E. Shulenburger
   Vice President for Academic Affairs
   NASULGC, A Public Universities Association

   — David Shulenburger    Jan 7, 08:00 PM    #

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