The fall semester has recently concluded at many colleges and universities. Some students have now completed the necessary credit hours and received their diplomas. That is the tangible evidence of having gone to college and for most it serves the purpose of satisfying the B.A. degree requirement that so many employers now insist upon.
Has the college experience, however, given the students more than just a piece of paper attesting to their having completed enough credits to qualify for a degree? Are they better at thinking and writing than when they entered? Unfortunately, we don’t really know.
Former college president Richard Hersh writes in the afterword to his recent book (co-edited with John Merrow) Declining by Degrees, “to date, we have no measures of the cumulative result of an undergraduate education.” While it may seem to be perfectly clear that some graduates (for example, the kid who knocks himself out in a pre-med curriculum) derive an enormous benefit from their studies and others (for example, the scholarship athlete who never takes a remotely challenging course) are educationally no different than on their first day as freshmen, we just don’t know.
Rather than just lamenting this fact, a few people are trying to do something about it.
Roger Benjamin and Marc Chun of the Council for Aid to Education write in the magazine Peer Review that they have undertaken “to build a new assessment approach for higher education. This approach, which assesses the ‘value added’ of the institution, has now evolved into the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) project.” Interesting – what’s it all about?
CLA avoids the common approaches that are widely used in higher education assessment. No actuarial data such as student SAT scores and faculty salaries that are sometimes used as proxies for educational quality; no student self-reports on their supposed educational progress; no surveys by education leaders as to the perceived quality of institutions. None of that reliably measures the one thing that counts – how well students have learned. Therefore, CLA focuses on direct measures of student learning.
But what learning? Recognizing that students don’t all study the same things, CLA attempts to measure general education skills including analytic reasoning, critical thinking, and written communication. Those are the educational elements that should be common to all students, no matter what their particular majors. What CLA is interested in, according to Benjamin and Chun, is “students’ demonstrated ability to use information.”
Specifically, CLA did a feasibility study involving two sets of performance measures. The first set consists of a number of tasks involving the ability to comprehend data presented, review documents, synthesize information, and write a cogent response to a question about the material. The second set consists of writing assignments calling upon the student to formulate an argument on a topic and also to analyze an argument given to them. The recommended test battery takes three hours to complete.
Since the testing involves writing rather than objective answers, grading is an obvious problem. Finding enough competent people to read and evaluate the work would be difficult and costly, but Benjamin and Chun report that the answers can be scored by computer. If computers can be programmed to beat the top chess players in the world, I suppose they can be programmed to evaluate the clarity of writing and cogency of argumentation. In fact, having one well-programmed computer would certainly be better than relying on fallible and non-uniform humans.
Use of CLA would enable us to make two important comparisons. First, we would be able to determine how much better students do from their freshman year to their senior year. Second, we could make comparisons between schools.
The latter might prove to be particularly enlightening, especially if it showed that the highest priced and more prestigious institutions do not necessarily produce academic gains to match their reputations. For years, observers of academia, such as Thomas Sowell, have maintained that the best education is often found at institutions other than those that are regarded as our elite schools. Widespread use of CLA might prove that to be the case.
So far, only a small number of schools around the country have chosen to give CLA a try, and apparently none in North Carolina. It’s easy to see why many administrators would be reluctant to institute the program – it might confirm people’s suspicions that their college isn’t really doing much to enhance the key knowledge and skills of students.