A proposal by the Commission on the Future of Higher Education for the establishment of standardized tests to evaluate how much college students are learning has received criticism from Dean of the College Paul Armstrong.
The commission, appointed last September by the Bush administration, aims to develop a comprehensive national strategy for postsecondary education that will meet the needs of the country's diverse population groups as well as economic and workforce needs, according to a Sept. 19 press release from the U.S. Department of Education.
The proposal for standardized tests came early this year from the commission's chairman, Charles Miller. In a memorandum to the commission's members, Miller detailed his reasons for promoting the tests.
"There is gathering momentum for measuring through testing what students learn or what skills they acquire in college beyond a traditional certificate or degree," Miller wrote. Specifically, the commission wants to focus on four major skills: critical thinking, analytic reasoning, problem solving and written communications.
Miller said three independent developments in the area of student testing have shown "promise."
First, the Collegiate Learning Assessment was formed as a result of a multi-year trial by the Rand Corporation that included 122 higher education institutions. The CLA assesses institutions by testing a group of first-year students in the fall and a group of seniors in the spring. According to the CLA's Web site, the student assessment includes a "real-life" activity such as writing memos or policy recommendations using a series of documents. Another component, a writing prompt, attempts to evaluate students' ability "to articulate complex ideas, examine claims and evidence, support ideas with relevant reasons and examples, sustain a coherent discussion and use standard written English," the Web site reads.
The second effort, a test developed by the Educational Testing Service, which measures college-level reading, mathematics, writing and critical thinking, will be promoted next January, according to Miller's memorandum. Similarly, in a third effort, the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education has developed a new program of testing college students in five states so far.
For his part, Armstrong said he is not surprised by the commission's emphasis on greater accountability. Armstrong said that when he served as dean at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, state education officials pressed for one core curriculum for all 64 SUNY campuses in order to better gauge student learning. "It's a top-down effort to control universities," Armstrong said.
Armstrong said he is against instituting standardized tests in colleges and universities, although he believes another measure should be established to evaluate how much students are learning. "The reductionism is just breathtaking, trying to boil it down to a number. It was a failed experiment in the K-12 level, and it's even less appropriate in higher education," he said.
Instead, Armstrong points to the Teagle Foundation as a better way to measure student learning at colleges and universities. The foundation is a consortium composed of other schools with open curricula. This year, the University received a $100,000 grant from the foundation, which will go toward evaluating the quality of education at Brown. Armstrong said alums will be interviewed on the education they received at the University, and data will be gathered on how broadly students select their classes in an open curriculum.
"The goal should be what we do with our open curriculum," Armstrong said.
At Columbia University, where there is a very strict core curriculum, processes of evaluating student learning are integrated, said Columbia Provost Alan Brinkley.
Brinkley said he is more open to the use of standardized tests in colleges and universities than Armstrong. "I certainly wouldn't say there's never a place for standardized tests in education," Brinkley said.
However, like Armstrong, he believes there are better ways to go about evaluating students than through standardized tests.
"There's a great push for many universities to assess how much their students are learning, but there are many other ways to do that. We don't have a terminal process, but we have many processes built in," Brinkley said.
Both Brinkley and Armstrong believe the education students receive at colleges and universities varies in ways that cannot be captured by one standardized test for all.
"It shows that legislatures don't trust faculty," Armstrong said.
