Thus far, most, possibly all, of the direct criticism of assessment has appeared in journals that are read by academics and a few other insiders. That changed today with the publication of Molly Worthen’s piece on assessment in the New York Times. Curiously it’s in the Sunday Review, even though today is most certainly a Friday. With any luck this will help put assessment on the public’s radar in a way that no number of articles in the Chronicle or Inside Higher Ed could.
From Worthen’s article:
If you thought this task [of figuring out what students have learned] required only low-tech materials like a pile of final exams and a red pen, you’re stuck in the 20th century. In 2018, more and more university administrators want campuswide, quantifiable data that reveal what skills students are learning. Their desire has fed a bureaucratic behemoth known as learning outcomes assessment. This elaborate, expensive, supposedly data-driven analysis seeks to translate the subtleties of the classroom into PowerPoint slides packed with statistics — in the hope of deflecting the charge that students pay too much for degrees that mean too little.