Collegiate Times

With the first day of classes in August, this year?s incoming freshmen thought they had successfully escaped the world of bell-schedules, cafeteria food and standardized testing. However, that soon may not be the case.

The Commission on the Future of Higher Education, put together last fall by the U.S. Department of Education, is exploring a standardized test for colleges.

The test, developed by the Council for Aid to Education, was called the Collegiate Learning Assessment test. It has already been tested on nine campuses of the University of Texas.

The National Education Association Director for Virginia, Meg Gruber, was against the panel?s call for accountability at the collegiate level.

?It shows a severe lack of trust in who we?re hiring,? Gruber said. ?It shows a severe lack of trust in whatever system the college has in place to be monitoring their employees. I think it?s ridiculous to say that we know. They have no clue that they?re being accountable.?

The tests would assess the writing, critical thinking and problem-solving skills of students.

Roger Benjamin, president and CEO of the Council for Aid to Education, said the bottom-line for these tests was to see whether higher education institutions could better provide tools for assessments for learning to colleagues and professors. The tests were created for performance tasks and feasibility studies.

?We develop sophisticated realistic problems,? Benjamin said. ?They?re in fact essay-formats, not multiple-choice, which is not good at assessing critical skills and knowledge.?

The tests, however, were expensive to develop and to distribute widely.

Edd Sewell, communication professor, was concerned with the assessment of academic ability.

?This means that we no longer educate the person as much as we input useless data in their brain for short-term output recall on some exam,? Sewell said. ?There is inadequate time left to deal with significant and creative problem solving or instilling an excitement about history or literature, because we need to be sure the student knows the twenty-five useless data-oids that have no connection with being a well-educated person who ?plays well with others? in the larger context of life.?

Gruber said unlike the ability of a state to regulate what is taught across state elementary and secondary education, synchronizing higher education amounts to an impossible task.

?I don?t think they?re going to have the same ability to control what goes on in college campuses,? Gruber said. ?What concerns me is that the general public who hear little sound bites think they sound good and buy into that as being the truth. If U.S. colleges are so bad, why do we have so many foreign students coming over here to get a college education??