American college students may soon see their progress tracked by standardized tests, a practice they thought they left behind in high school. A federal commission report due this August will investigate the potential for these tests to measure the quality of American higher education in areas such as accountability, cost and quality.
Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings appointed the 19-member Commission on the Future of Higher Education last fall in an effort to study ways to improve the nation's colleges and universities.
Commission chairman Charles Miller, once head of the Regents of the University of Texas, said he envisions using the tests to create a system in which colleges and universities could be held more accountable for educating their students.
"What is clearly lacking is a nationwide system for comparative performance purposes, using standard formats," Miller wrote in a memo to the other members of the commission.
The University of Texas implemented a system of standardized testing to ascertain student progress several years ago under Miller's supervision.
This system, however, was not without its problems. The school aborted its initial attempts to develop its own test due to concerns that it would take too long to create.
The university then tried using a test developed by the Educational Testing Service which was also discarded before the school finally settled on the Collegiate Learning Assessment exam as its measure of academic progress.
The University of Texas System laid out the goals of the assessment exam on its web site.
"Assessment involves making our expectations explicit and public, setting appropriate criteria and high expectations for learning quality; systematically gathering, analyzing and interpreting evidence to determine how well performance matches those expectations and standards; and using resulting information to document, explain and improve performance," the statement reads.
While the exact recommendations of the commission have not yet been released, some Dartmouth students criticized the implementation of a national program of standardized testing.
Raj Shrestha '06 said that there are already some independent ranking systems in place for measuring academic performance at colleges and universities, making standardized tests unnecessary.
"[With these rankings] it's easy to get a general idea of how well colleges teach their students," Shrestha said.
Robert Lim '08 expressed concern over the specificity of the material that the tests are trying to measure, particularly given the variety of majors offered by colleges and universities.
"How do you give one standardized test to a math student and the same test to an art student?" Lim asked.
Other students were more receptive to the idea of standardized testing in American institutions of higher education.
"I think there's a lot of concern in society at large about what exactly students are learning at colleges and universities, particularly given rapidly increasing tuition rates, so some sort of standardized test would probably be a good step," Scott Glabe '06 said.
"Obviously it would be important to avoid teaching to a test, but a test that simply measures what students are learning could be very useful so long as it's clear exactly what it's measuring," he said.
