Dive Brief:
- A new paper by Fredrik deBoer for New America examines the potential of standardized tests in higher education, something that could help make sense of college quality, but comes with its share of controversy.
- DeBoer recommends external validation of any tests that are developed, which could be a hard sell to private testing companies, and the use of a sampling rather than census approach to how many students take the test on any given year.
- He also advocates for faculty and administrator involvement in the testing process, the use of test results in concert with other outcomes data in assessing schools, and a limit to how “high-stakes” the tests are — though deBoer says they can’t be no-stakes.
Dive Insight:
With aggregate student debt topping $1.2 trillion and elected officials and families becoming more critical of return on investment, higher education assessments have been proposed as a way to objectively measure how well schools are serving students and hold colleges accountable. In the K-12 sphere, annual assessments have been mandated by federal law since the George W. Bush administration created No Child Left Behind.
A key difference deBoer recommends is faculty involvement in the assessment process. The lack of teacher input in today’s K-12 standardized testing is a prime complaint of educators, who are blamed for student outcomes over which they, in many ways, have little control. If faculty are involved in the process in higher ed, perhaps the quality of the tests will be better respected within the post-secondary school system.