Best Comment on yesterday’s IHE article

Kara Moloney wrote a comment challenging the accuracy of the IHE’s reporting on the events at WASC.  Among other things, she was put out that Bob Shireman was quoted at length despite being an audience member rather than a panelist.  John Ahearn had this response.  If anyone knows him, please buy him a beer for his service to academia.

” Well-intentioned and imperfect people dedicated to students and their learning….”

…who caused many of us to expend massive amounts of time and resources on an ultimately futile task. The magnitude of the failure would warrant a thorough apology, not whitewashing or a passing comment about humility, and perhaps an acknowledgement that the people who expressed skepticism about this costly enterprise were correct.

“One more thing: Who are these ‘many assessment haters in higher education’? How many of them actually exist? I ask because I have yet to encounter a hater in person.”

You are obviously not a regular member of an academic department. In most departments I’ve encountered–including social-science and education departments, from whom you might expect some buy-in–the attitude is that we need to get “assessment” done as quickly and painlessly as possible so that we can get back to the task of educating students as best we can, figuring out what they’ve learned, and thinking about how they can learn more.

Another example: At the beginning of the assessment craze, I happened to be serving as chair of my university’s curriculum committee. The assessment director (I forget her title) sent me an email telling me that I had to require learning objectives to be spelled out in the syllabus of every course, typically with explanations of which assessment methods would be used to measure each learning objective, etc., etc. After a glance at the org chart and the policy manual, I refused, and told her that she was free to show up to the committee meetings if she wished to make that request.

I never heard from her again. While the administration or our accreditors eventually mandated learning outcomes, etc., in the syllabus, I like to think that I held them off for a few years, and saved lots of people’s time in the process.