Assessment and Accountability

Mandated Assessment of Educational Outcomes

Report addressing “state-mandated” assessment of higher education, including attempts to measure learning outcomes; recommendations on standards that should be observed when developing an assessment plan.

 

Establishing a Culture of Assessment

Fifteen elements of assessment success—how many does your campus have?

The Ultimate Utility of Nonutility

Forget trying to measure learning. The greatest value of the liberal arts can be that students start to understand the complexity, confusion, and contradiction at the heart of human experience.

Making Faculty Count in Higher Education Assessment

Making accreditation and assessment meaningful while fighting a growing marketplace ideology and increasing federal mandates isn’t easy. But it’s possible.

Beyond Crude Measurement and Consumerism

We ought to be up to the task of figuring out what it is that our students know by the end of four years at college that they did not know at the beginning.

A Student’s Assessment

An Academe student intern reacts to Stanley Katz’s essay.

Measuring What Matters

Higher Learning, Greater Good: The Private and Social Benefits of Higher Education. Walter W. McMahon. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

From the Editor: Assessment, Accountability, and Albatrosses

By the time you read this, in the Indian summer of our discontent, BP probably will have finished its static kill and relief wells in the Gulf of Mexico.

Eager students will certainly be headed back into classrooms at the University of California, Berkeley, now home to what is believed to be the largest public-private research consortium in the country. Only a tiny handful of those students may have access to the proprietary, private biofuel research labs of BP, leveraged by public money and located on a public university’s campus.

Academics Adrift?

Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Intellectual Life and the University of Commerce

A revaluation of teaching could help British universities cope with the government’s destructive reforms.

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