Laurie Fendrich got it right in 2007

Back in 2007 when assessment had just started to really intrude into academic life, Laurie Fendrich wrote the first (and still the best) statement I have read about assessment. Her references to May Day parades,  Mao, and forced self-criticism, presciently captured the Taylorism meets Orwell quality of assessment.  The assessment industry has finally conceded that it has gone down an  “unproductive path.”  They can’t claim that they had not been warned over a decade ago about what they were doing.

This is just the first paragraph.  Read the whole thing here. Unfortunately it is so good that 12 years after its publication, the Chronicle still has it paywalled.

Outcomes-assessment practices in higher education are grotesque, unintentional parodies of both social science and “accountability.” No matter how much they purport to be about “standards” or student “needs,” they are in fact scams run by bloodless bureaucrats who, steeped in jargon like “mapping learning goals” and “closing the loop,” do not understand the holistic nature of a good college education. For all the highfalutin pronouncements accompanying the current May Day parade of outcomes assessment, in the end they boil down to a wholesale abandonment of the very idea of higher education. Whatever their purpose, outcomes-assessment practices force-march professors to a Maoist countryside where they are made to dig onions until they are exhausted, and then compelled to spend the rest of their waking hours confessing how much they’ve learned by digging onions. The mentor-protégé model of a college education is gone. We now confront the robot model, in which knowledge is reduced to what Nietzsche called “knowledge stones” — bits of information that administrators can count and students can digest without thinking.