Some institutions have signed on to conduct cross-sectional assessments in which 100 freshmen are assessed in the fall and 100 seniors in the spring. Others have decided to conduct longitudinal assessments in which a total of 300 freshmen are assessed three times during their college careers. In both cases, it is the institution, and not the student, that is the primary unit of analysis. Collegiate Learning Assessment results are intended to provide institutions with cues as to where and how to improve teaching and learning. Score reports are confidential and are given only to the institutions; members of consortia agree to share reports with each other. All students who take the Collegiate Learning Assessment do so on a volunteer basis, though they are often offered incentives such as small monetary awards, iPods, and even preferred parking spaces. SAT or ACT scores are used to control for student ability in order to measure improvement within a given institution. The Collegiate Learning Assessment employs a “matrix sampling” strategy, i.e., students are randomly assigned to a set of tasks, and the individual student performs only a small portion of the tasks, though all the tasks are given at the same school.

The Collegiate Learning Assessment measures competencies critical for success in higher education and in the real world for which students are presumably being prepared. Without question, Stephen Klein acknowledges, “One test can’t do everything.” At the same time, he insists, “Because you can’t measure everything doesn’t mean you can’t measure anything.”

Overcoming Inertia—and Fear

At a daylong meeting of the Ivies, called by the Teagle Foundation to discuss the topic of establishing the proper balance between teaching and research, W. Robert Connor, president of the Teagle Foundation, reports that the word “assessment” came up at 4:15 p.m. The word “assessment,” he explains, is “very rarely used at these meetings.” The emergence of still another standardized test—this time at the higher education level—has not inspired universal enthusiasm within that community. As Conner observes, for the Collegiate Learning Assessment, it’s not so much a case of swimming against the tide but of “struggling to over-come a huge mass of inertia.”

Richard Hersh puts it a bit more bluntly: Higher education, he declares, is “the only industry in which competitors are rated on the caliber of their customers rather than on their product...”¹ It is precisely because the American system of higher education has long been regarded as world class that it is diffi cult to make the case for the need to assess student learning, particularly among highly selective institutions. These are the very same institutions, after all, that helped establish America’s reputation for excellence in higher education in the fi rst place. Comments such as the following tend to support Hersh’s observation: “You could put every Harvard student in a subterranean vault for four years, and they’d still grow,”² said one Harvard professor. Roger Benjamin says that such comments refl ect “the argument of the top schools” which are fearful that “they would be penalized because there would be less growth to demonstrate.” Hersh, however, disputes the notion that comparing the value added of highly selective colleges would produce a limited amount of value added, pointing out that “[No] such ‘ceiling effect’ has been found in the Collegiate Learning Assessment national data sample,” which includes highly selective schools.³

¹ Richard H. Hersh, “What Does College Teach?” The Atlantic Monthly, November 2005.
² Linda K. Wertheimer, “Testing Harvard,” The Boston Globe, http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/
April 22, 2007.
³ Richard H. Hersh, “Going Naked,” Peer Review 9(2): 4-8, 2007.

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