A Threat to Higher Education

I know how much you all have come to enjoy standardized testing over the years. The CMTs, the CAPT. the SATs. You were probably getting a little sad to have to leave all that behind. Well, take heart! If Margaret Spellings, George Bush's Secretary of Education, has her way, you'll have tests like that at college, too.

A higher education commission named by the Bush administration is examining whether standardized testing should be expanded into universities and colleges to prove that students are learning and to allow easier comparisons on quality.

Charles Miller, a business executive who is the commission's chairman, wrote in a memorandum recently to the 18 other members that he saw a developing consensus over the need for more accountability in higher education.

As is often the case with spectacularly bad ideas, there's some underlying sense to it.

"What is clearly lacking is a nationwide system for comparative performance purposes, using standard formats," Mr. Miller wrote, adding that student learning was a main component that should be measured.

Right now we're relying on US News and World Report, or the Princeton Review to tell us how good colleges are. How do you really know if the college you're going to give your $45,000 a year to is worth it, or if the program you'll be majoring in is worth it?

In an interview, Mr. Miller said he was not envisioning a higher education version of the No Child Left Behind Act, which requires standardizing testing in public schools and penalizes schools whose students do not improve. "There is no way you can mandate a single set of tests, to have a federalist higher education system," he said.

But he said public reporting of collegiate learning as measured through testing "would be greatly beneficial to the students, parents, taxpayers and employers" and that he would like to create a national database that includes measures of learning.

The problem is that what you are going to college for is too diverse to be handily measured. And really, test like this are tests for the school, not for the students. How well did we educate you? How good are the schools (not the students)? For a local community, and a local school system, I can (grudgingly) admit some rationale for testing.

But not at college. Do you want to spend your money to take courses so that your university can get a good grade? And there are plenty of other ways to gauge how good a school is.

“I can’t think of any reason that a student would want or need to take that kind of test,” said sophomore Julia Brown, a professional writing major [at Carnegie Mellon University]. “How do you test a humanities major versus a computer science major? There’s no way to really standardize that.”

“Colleges have reputations anyway. Why do we need another way to measure that?” asked Karen Doersch, a first-year cognitive science major. “A private institution should be independent from the government.”

Adminstrators agree.

Educators are wary. "To subject colleges to uniform standards is to trivialize what goes on in higher education," said Leon Botstein, president of Bard College. "Excellence comes in many unusual ways. You cannot apply the rules of high-stakes testing in high schools to universities."

[Carnegie Mellon] University’s administration agrees. When asked what local reactions might be like if the tests were to be administered, William Elliott, Carnegie Mellon’s vice president for enrollment, answered: “Not pleased.”