Liberal Arts College Presidents Speak Out on Accountability through Testing

April 2006 - Early reports coming out of the federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education hinted that some form of mandatory testing would be recommended as a form of accountability for America’s colleges and universities. Although the Commission Chairman Charles Miller recently seems to have backed away from that recommendation, accountability for higher education continues to be debated among the Commission’s 19 members. If testing is not the answer, then what accountability measures, if any, should be put in place to assure the public that the cost of higher education is worth the increasing investment made by parents and the government?

Sharon Herzberger
President of WhittierCollege
(562) 907-4201

president@whittier.edu

The public has to start somewhere to sort through piles of information about the value added by a college or university.  I urge that people go right to the heart of the educational enterprise:  the faculty. 

Since close faculty-student interaction is the most important predictor of transformation and growth in college, all those selecting a college should demand proof of the relationship built between faculty and students, proof involving more than anecdotes and simplistic, misleading student/faculty ratios. 

Demand to see comparison information gathered through the National Survey of Student Engagement.  Talk with as many students as possible on campus.  Ask: how well do you know your advisor? Do you receive helpful feedback? Do you have a close faculty mentor?  Do you know three professors well enough to get recommendations?  Has a faculty member changed the way you think about yourself and your world? 
 

Accountability through standardized testing almost seems like an oxymoron.  Whose accountability?  Standardized to what ideals, and for what purpose?  Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner taught us about multiple intelligences, so if it is aptitudes we are hoping to understand, we need many means to evaluate them.  If it is achievement we are evaluating, we also need to review a broad spectrum of measures.  If it is “fit” with an institution we are measuring, we need to do it on an individualized, not a standardized, basis, given the great variation among institutions and people.  Similarly, accountability for teachers or students needs to be measured in terms of growth against students’ own baseline skills and achievements -- not against standardized norms, which could show a student testing high because of basic ability and environmental advantages, rather than measuring learning.  Obviously, I believe that it is at best a very incomplete instrument of accountability. 

“Testing” is probably an unhelpfully inflammatory word in talking about appropriate accountability for higher education institutions. No one in his or her right mind should want a mandatory, one-size-fits-all, multiple-choice instrument to measure the significant outcomes of a college education. But that is what “testing” calls to mind.

Yet, we all should want some accurate way of assessing whether students are learning at this nation’s colleges and universities. Assessment is a crucial component of appropriate accountability for colleges and universities. 

The broad spectrum of missions in American higher education requires an array of measurement strategies for this task of assessment. Each should be overseen by a professionally competent organization that is independent both of federal and state governments and of individual colleges and universities. 

In the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) we have two sophisticated, pioneering measurement instruments. We need many more.

Standardized testing ultimately dictates the type of knowledge that is valued precisely because it is measurable. Since the knowledge to be assessed has to be subject to empirical evaluation, it also has to be factual and technical, partial to little ideas rather than complex, big ideas involving questions of the meaning of life, aesthetics, and moral and ethical judgment that defy standardized assessment. 

We must reclaim for American education those big ideas. We must redefine accountability to balance that which can and should be empirically measured, with that which advances spirit, soul, creativity and character, and which is not so readily subject to empirical assessment.  

Perhaps we should replace accountability as currently understood with greater transparency and trust. By making available all sorts of data -- empirical and subjective -- we would ask the general public to analyze and judge the quality and success of our educational enterprises.

Assessment is too often about counting things that can be quantified, things that can be bought and sold. Freshmen become new material, education is value added, and graduates are products to serve the appetite of the global marketplace. This may be a good metaphor for a job training program, but it is not liberal education. A liberal education is about freeing students from a slavish adherence to the will of others or popular opinion. It is about freeing students to build a life worth living, built on a thoughtful foundation that the student has made his or her own. How do you assess freedom? Assessment and learning go hand in hand. The best education occurs when a student and teacher engage in a continued process of self-examination, false starts, reconsiderations and experimentation. Assessment should not be an isolated measure of an education, but an integral part of it. 

Colleges and universities should demonstrate their effectiveness through a scholarly examination of the impact of their educational programs on students.  Faculty and administrators are accustomed to scholarly endeavors in which they must provide supporting evidence for assertions made; we should expect to do no less when making claims about degrees to which students become better educated through an institution’s curriculum.  Combining nationally-normed instruments (the National Survey of Student Engagement, to measure active involvement of students in their own education, and the Collegiate Learning Assessment Project, to measure changes that occur between matriculation and graduation in students’ ability to think, reason and write) with qualitative and quantitative evaluations designed by individual institutions to gauge the influence of unique curricular features is an effective way to provide verifiable evidence of the value of a college education.  Institutions should be free to elect the most appropriate methods to demonstrate accountability and effectiveness.

The proposal to develop a standardized exam for all undergraduates flunks the reality test. The reason is simple: undergraduate education programs vary considerably. The engineering student's course of study is drastically different from the chemistry major's or the aspiring musician. A single test can never account for this diversity of objectives. What is needed is an approach to assessment that is flexible enough to take into account the complexity and diversity of higher education. 

Colleges and universities should act boldly and take on the responsibility for developing multiple assessments.  All institutions do, or should, share one goal: effecting a substantial difference in students' knowledge and capabilities. Evaluating how and why we encourage transformation is a worthy goal, and promising efforts are already under way. Colleges and university presidents need to embrace these initiatives now, rather than waiting to be presented with a plan. 

Joan Hinde Stewart
President of Hamilton College
(315) 859-4105
jstewart@hamilton.edu
Standardized testing is not the way for institutions of higher education to demonstrate effectiveness. At Hamilton College we have moved away from requiring a single standardized test for admission for the same reason that we would not support a single national test for student learning – one size does not fit all. But because we think accountability is important, we have been working over the past six years, with significant funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to assess student learning in a liberal arts setting. This initiative is proving valuable to Hamilton and we believe its methodology will be replicable in other liberal arts colleges. 

MicheleTolela Myers
President ofSarahLawrence College
(914) 395-2219

mmyers@sarahlawrence.edu
Our responsibility for accountability is to stakeholders: students and their families, alumnae/i, donors and ourselves -- i.e., faculty and academic administrators. These are tough audiences, though the standards set are the appropriate ones. The notion of a one-size-fits-all graduation test fails to recognize the positive diversity among institutions of learning. 

Sarah Lawrence is vastly different from research and state universities, community colleges, regional master’s colleges and for-profit institutes. Even among national liberal arts colleges -- as much as we have in common -- a shared assessment tool would have many, maybe too many, differences to contend with. Our students, for example, work with faculty advisers to set goals and design their academic pursuits accordingly, and they are extensively evaluated in writing. We don’t consider standardized tests for our admissions, and tests are not a major part of our curriculum -- so how could a standardized test measure our students’ achievement?