Academic Assessment in Higher Ed

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We don't have an "Education" discussion board, so not knowing exactly where to post this, I chose to put it here, since assessment in higher ed is connected to school reaccreditation by state education boards, so it is a political issue.  As I'll try to demonstrate, the origins of academic assessment are political too.  If someone wants to move the thread, though, I'll understand.

I have written posts in various threads in the past on assessment tests in education, but, after attending a meeting at my institution last week, I had a chance to sit down and write some of my thoughts down in a more coherent and systematic fashion, so I'll post them in their entirety here.

Two weeks ago, I was dragooned into attending a College of Liberal Arts meeting at my institution, led by the new dean and the ever-more important tzar of assessment.  During a diatribe of the latter about why an assessment plan for the College I had worked on with other colleagues last year for nine months was "very complicated" (it really wasn't) and likely wouldn't be implemented, I sat near the back of the room, grateful that I had not brought food to the meeting lest I hurl it at him with abandon.  "How," he asked, beginning a mantra often heard among assessment devotees in college administrations these days, "do we know that our graduates can write well?"  As he said this, my mind flashed back onto a scene from a department orientation for my very first teaching job at the college level in remedial composition seventeen years ago at another institution.  The coordinator at this orientation announced that they would begin to move away from the teaching of grammar in these classes, even though they expected us to continue to assess it in some measure, in order to move closer toward teaching the students how to be "better conversationalists" and "academic thesis" writers.  I vowed to myself that I would devote some time in all of my sessions to teaching grammar anyway, even though many of my fellow graduate assistants appeared to greet this announcement with a sigh of relief.  At that moment in last week's meeting, I realized that an astonishingly straight line connected this distant memory to my current assessment tzar's bitter tirade.

It remained the case, despite this change of plans in the composition department I worked in all those eons ago, that progress through one's freshman year in college still worked much like my own did when I attended undergraduate school.  If you didn't test into Comp 101 as a freshman, you took your remedial comp, then 101 and 102, along with 100-level general education classes and 100-level prerequisites in your intended major.  It was only after successful completion of 102 that you were allowed into 200-level and above classes, which required progressively more difficult writing assignments involving research and argument appropriate to the distinct fields you were studying.

But two things began to happen in rapid succession at that point in universities all across the country.  

The first was the growing pervasiveness of the assessment movement in higher ed, which was "founded" by the Learner Centered theorists of pedagogy ten years before my initial college teaching job.  By the late eighties and early nineties, Commissions of Higher Education in states began to require some kinds of assessment reports from colleges and universities for the purposes of the latter qualifying for another decade of reaccreditation from the state.  

The second thing that happened was the steadily increasing demand for increasing enrollment and retention.  With University budgets bulging, mainly as a result of a glut of ever-increasing, highly compensated administrator positions and student services facilities combined with ever-shrinking state and federal education spending, the heat was on to make sure the college admitted more students and kept them there

These enrollment pressures, felt in practically every department in the institutions of higher learning, slowly but surely brought down the walls of prerequisites for upper-division courses, so that presently, a student without Comp 101 or 102 may sign up for a 300 or 400 level course, at my institution and many, many others.  This process, combined with the abandonment of nuts-and-bolts grammatical instruction in many remedial and entry-level composition courses, has suddenly placed every single instructor, at every level of teaching in the University, in the position of being a professor of both their subject matter and remedial comp.  And thence comes the demand from the assessment regime in college administrations for standardized assessment rubrics, to ensure that "we," meaning "they," the administrators, state reaccreditation board, state legislators and taxpayers, can be assured that our graduates, who may not have ended up finishing Comp 102 until their senior year, can write a complete sentence when they begin to apply for jobs after their hats and tassels have floated back down to earth.  And they will graduate, you see, because, if we teachers flunk too many students in our classes, that hurts retention, and we get dinged for that too.

While all this is going on, the entire compliment of instructors at a university, having been drafted into the multitudinous army of sentence fragment police while serving double-time on the front lines as physics, math, psychology and philosophy teachers, are really not trusted to be up to the job by their governing administrators.  A rigorous vetting process that selected a new teacher from a pool of literally hundreds of candidates, followed by another six-year vetting process for tenure (on the 35% of new occasions where tenure-track positions are available nowadays) that reviews teaching performance does not seem to create that confidence.  Of course, admittedly, it's hard to do, since the teacher mentoring process for new instructors is often only nominal at best, and when the students, the institution's "customers," play such an influential role in tenure process by submitting their evaluation forms at the end of each term for all their new teachers.  It's rather likely that the forms the students submit would be better suited for the Nielson Ratings than a tenure committee, but, once again, what passes for the priority of retention wins this battle too.  And so, the administrators insist on regular submission of assessment results, so that "we" can all be assured that students who graduate from college can write in their native language.

Assessment, at the end of the day, is a politician's idea of creating "accountability" in education, and has precious little to do with pedagogical enhancement.  Were we really serious about knuckling down and making our students into better writers again, in this age of incomprehensible text message abbreviations, we would reinstitute the regime of writing prerequisites and insist that remedial and 100-level composition courses employ instructors that both can and do teach grammar so that the students can be ensured at least a year of ongoing concentration on better writing.  This would in turn free other teachers in upper-division classes to focus on various forms of disseminating discipline-specific writing skills.  I am often complimented on how well I write, but this skill, to the meager degree that I possess it, did not fall out of the sky and land on my keyboard; it was acquired through the very practice that the prerequisite program forced me to continue.  In addition, new teachers should be put through real, instead of fictive, mentoring programs where they are observed and shown by veteran teachers a variety of sound pedagogical methods to apply to different possible learning challenges, for which they must show progress that bears weight on decisions regarding their promotion.  Student feedback should be welcomed and obtained, certainly, for learner-centered approaches undoubtedly have merit and there are different learning-styles in every classroom that teachers do have to be prepared to accommodate.  But such feedback should exert far from the greatest amount of influence on the evaluation of teachers.    

But we do not do these things.  And the reason that we don't is that, for some time now, enrollment has been more important than ensuring virtuous writing skills in the University.  Administrators cannot reasonably maintain this priority, which effectively prevents the restoration of more sound curricular choices, and at the same time fairly harass their entire faculty about the need for every class to implement a standardized framework of remedial composition evaluation.  I say this, despite appearances, with some real understanding of and sympathy for the administrators' predicament on this issue; the state boards have given them their marching orders and will withhold recertification of a school unless those numbers are turned over.  I served as a department assessment coordinator and on the college-wide assessment board at my last place of employment, and have served in similar capacities at my present institution.  I have always been willing to help turn over numbers in the desired formats.  But, please, please, for the love of sanity and decent common sense, please do not demand that I believe in those numbers.  They are fundamentally irrelevant measures of pedagogical effectiveness.  Anyone who has taught classes for even only two semesters knows very well that a teaching technique that produced fantastic results with a group of students one semester will flop the very next term with a different group.  Good teachers learn how to adjust to this in their own classrooms, which is one reason you want mentoring for new teachers, but also with precise observation and knowledge of students, flexibility and an investment of time and commitment; state education boards don't.

But, until changes are made to the irrational assessment regime, I say that, in addition to running higher ed assessments, I think we should run another set of assessment exams in state legislatures and Congress.  As a taxpayer, we, the citizens, would really like to know how many of our representatives actually read, and understand, the bills they vote on that determine what our lives will be like and how our civilization will fare.  Thanks!

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It varies, Yelnoc, both within schools and between them.  At all the institutions where I have taught, students who do not test into comp 101 and need remedial comp, which amounts to a good share of students, often can't write a complete grammatically correct sentence, and often write in abbreviations and conversational idioms.  Once a student has made it through comp 102, at the end of their freshman year at the earliest, they have improved some, and know how to write a short essay that is basically coherent and organized.  But, as noted above, without the prerequisites being uniformly enforced, students might not finish their comp requirements until very late, and in that case, systematic writing instruction may fall through during the remainder of their coursework.  That is why the college wants standard writing assessment rubrics from all of the classes offered in the curriculum.  But, it's ironic, of course, because it was the universities that dropped the prerequisites in the first place, and now, in order to hold up enrollment, they add the assessments instead.

I think, as Torie alluded to in another thread, the poor writing skills many students come to college with are often one of many shortcomings of modern high school education in various places.  I remember having to write several longish research papers in high school English and history classes, and I think this is still the practice in some places; but in others, barely any writing seems to be going on in high school at all.

How is your high school, Yelnoc?  How much writing do you do?  You write pretty well on this forum, so I'm assuming they give you some good practice and instruction.  

    

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Michael,

Welcome to the Forum!  What you're describing sounds a great deal like what passes for grades given for the writing component of assignments here, but unless it's a composition class, generally papers don't get deducted up to 25% for bad writing mechanics.

Yelnoc,

Thanks for your detailed reply.  Yeah, it does sound like you have some inequitable class placement policies at your school.  But it's nonetheless great that you're in classes that emphasize essay writing.  Please keep to your ambition to be a published author!  If the written materials on your hard drive are better still than your writing on the forum, I'd say that's a very achievable goal.  I think you're right that many good writers are also prolific readers, and learn how to imitate styles they like.  In my field of study, I admired writers that were very lucid but succinct and to the point, so I try to imitate that in my own writing.  I'm far from successful much of the time.  I think the reason for that is that I did research in Germany for a cumulative year and a half, and German writers in my field tend to use almost endlessly long sentences, with unbelievable numbers of subordinate clauses.  So, when I wrote a few essays in German, I picked up that habit and it's stuck with me, unfortunately.  But good writing takes constant practice and self-correction, it's never really a "done" deal.

Yeah, at a certain point in composition, we like to get students to resist using too many "be" verbs.  Compositions that have too many indicative verbs tend to look tedious and vaguely like lists of things fairly quickly.  The more ways you can work active verbs into compositions and use indicatives only when necessary, the better.