There are some policy makers who believe that student assessment is the essence of higher education accountability. In the view of some, if we just measure student progress toward agreed-upon goals using standardized tests, much of society's concerns about accountability will be addressed.
But it's not that simple. College students begin their higher education at vastly different starting points in their level of preparation, have different goals for their college experience, and to reach those goals they are likely to take any of a multitude of routes - made possible by the rich diversity of America's private colleges and universities.
Assessing a student's progress has been occurring on campuses for centuries, long before there were any external calls for it. It has continued because independent colleges and universities, as educational institutions, care about how their students are performing academically.
Most often, the student assessment programs at a particular institution are tied to the institution's mission. A liberal arts college with a predominantly traditional college-age student body may be interested in measuring a student's performance differently than would an urban institution with large numbers of older students, as an example.
Here you will find an overview of student assessment, as well as a collection of the various approaches that different kinds of institutions are taking to monitor and measure student progress -- not just in the classroom but across the educational experience.
College and University Web
Pages Relating to Assessment
A collection of Web pages devoted to assessment activities and plans at private colleges and universities.
(For institutional examples relating to other areas of accountability, see Institutional Examples.)
Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) The Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) is a national effort to assess the quality of undergraduate education by directly measuring student learning outcomes. The test was developed in recent years by the Council for Aid to Education (CAE), a national nonprofit organization. For more on the CLA, see:
Responding Responsibly to the Frenzy to Assess Learning in Higher Education, Richard J. Shavelson and Leta Huang, Change Magazine, January/February 2003. As well-intentioned reformers turn up the volume on their calls for assessment-based accountability in higher education, the authors warn that going forward without clearly defining what the reformers want to measure may result in assessing the wrong things.
Assessing Quality in Higher Education, Douglas C. Bennett (President, Earlham College), Liberal Education, Spring 2001. An overview of quality assessment approaches, and an argument for "value added" as the most useful approach.
What Makes a Revolution: Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 1980-2000, Marvin Lazerson, Ursula Wagener, and Nichole Shumanis. 1999. An historical perspective on the evolution of the assessment movement.
Gauging the Impact of Institutional Student-Assessment Strategies, National Center for Postsecondary Improvement report, September/October 1999. An examination of the nature, extent, and impact of student-assessment strategies based on a first-of-its-kind national survey by NCPI.
The National Survey of Student Engagement Now in its fourth year, NSSE offers a promising alternative for assessing the quality of undergraduate education. Unlike most college rankings, which are typically based on institutional resources and profiles of incoming students, NSSE focuses on how students actually use the resources their schools provide, and what they say about their experience.
Glosssary of Useful Assessment Terms. Just what are high-stakes testing and standardized testing? This useful site by the System for Adult Basic Education Support (Mass.) offers concise definitions of the most common assessment terms.
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