In either case, in the current political landscape, relying on reputation rather than performance might just not be enough to prevent a worst-case scenario: the introduction of mandatory standardized testing in our nation’s colleges. The recent report of the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education has cast a sharply critical eye on America’s higher education institutions.“Where once the United States led the world in educational attainment, recent data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development indicate that our nation is now ranked 12th among major industrialized countries in higher education attainment.”⁴ The report laments the inadequacy of “transparency and accountability for measuring institutional performance, which is more and more necessary to maintaining public trust in higher education.”⁵ At the same time, it applauds the Collegiate Learning Assessment for “promoting a culture of evidence-based assessment in higher education.”⁶ In the wake of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, with its heavy—some might say heavy-handed—reliance on standardized testing, there is a growing fear that the feds might be putting America’s higher education institutions on notice: Do something or we will. Is that the message of the Commission’s report?

Carol Geary Schneider, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, points out that “American society is always looking for a silver bullet”— that one brilliant move that will correct all problems. The unwritten message of NCLB, she says, is essentially, “Leave no child untested.” As a member of the Board of Trustees of the Council for Aid to Education, Schneider emphasizes that she is a strong supporter of the Collegiate Learning Assessment. At the same time, she says, “No single test can tell us all we need to know about student outcomes.” Moreover, she adds, the outcomes that the Collegiate Learning Assessment focuses on are “necessary but not sufficient. The concern we have is not with the measure itself but its use.” Schneider’s fear is that in American society’s never-ending search for that magical silver bullet, “Enthusiasts are rushing to make the Collegiate Learning Assessment ‘the measure.’”

Arguing that fifty years of measurement research “have warned against pursuing the blind alley of value added assessment,” Trudy W. Banta, vice chancellor for planning and institutional improvement at Indiana University-Purdue University, cautions that such an approach
can lead to the “homogenization of educational experiences and institutions,”⁷ and is not appropriate for use in comparing the effectiveness of higher education institutions. While acknowledging the need for standardized measures of student learning to permit institutional comparisons, she proposes as alternatives the use of electronic portfolios that can “illustrate growth over time” as well as academic discipline-based measures.⁸ The counter argument to the strategies Banta recommends is that electronic portfolios are “anything but standardized and therefore [are] unable to support institutional comparisons.”⁹ Given the sheer number of academic majors, the second strategy—measures based in academic disciplines—is likely to prove unwieldy. Such measures would have to be “created, calibrated to each other (so results can be combined across majors), and updated,” and the “wide differences of opinion within and between institutions as to what should be assessed in each academic discipline”¹⁰ would no doubtless require endless mediation. Regarding the so-called “blind alley,” according to the counter argument, “...much of the research Banta refers to uses individual-level scores, whereas the Collegiate Learning Assessment program uses scores that are much more reliable because they are aggregated up to the program or college level.”¹¹

⁴ A Test of Leadership, Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education, A Report of the Commission Appointed by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, U.S. Department of Education, September 2006, p. xii.
⁵ Ibid, p. 14.
⁶ Ibid, p. 23.
⁷ Trudy W. Banta, “A Warning on Measuring Learning Outcomes,” Inside Higher Ed, http://www.insidehighered.com/views/ January 26, 2007
⁸ Ibid.
⁹ Stephen Klein, Richard Shavelson, and Roger Benjamin,“Setting the Record Straight,” Inside Higher Ed,
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/ February 8, 2007.
¹⁰ Ibid.
¹¹ Ibid.

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