Quoting Joanna <123hop at comcast.net>:
> Not just "assessable" but assessable by a bureaucrat and in terms of
> what a bureaucrat understands: more, faster, bigger, etc. And
> because the bureaucrat decides what's assessable, he gets to make
> three times your salary.
>
> It is not possible to go along with this. It just isn't.
A little reality check from the front lines. All of the regional college and university accrediting bodies in the U. S. require assessment activities to be faculty driven. If some notorious faceless administrative bureaucrat instituted trivial assessment activities without faculty guidance, said college would be given a recommendation by a visiting accreditation evaluation team ("recommendation" is an accreditation euphemism for "you screwed up, you need to fix this or you will lose your accreditation"). Given the relative authority of these regional accrediting bodies, it is not feasible that something like NCLB could be implemented any time soon at the college and university level. College faculty have far more authority and control over curriculum than elementary and secondary school teachers do.
I have to say I'm fascinated by the claim that assessment of student learning is some evil bureaucratic scheme. We need to create meaningful strategies for assessing student learning if we want to improve our colleges and universities. It's a bit ironic to me that some faculty oppose assessment by relying on appeals to their own sacrosanct authority: "I know the students in my classes are learning!
We don't need any assessment to demonstrate that!" As shag would say, klewby4 time: that's an appeal to authority, not evidence, and any academic should be embarrassed for even implying that authority trumps evidence! --The institutional problem here is not the assessment of student learning; rather, the more (dare I say?) pernicious problem is the reflexive rejection of the use of evidence to guide how we teach our students and design our degree programs.
Miles