Assessment and Accountability

Faculty Forum: Against Assessment

Not long ago, I was in one of those now ubiquitous committee meetings on institutional assessment. As I listened to the speaker earnestly describe objectives and outcomes and a vast three-dimensional matrix filled with yet-to-be-obtained data, I cringed and sank lower in my seat. I hoped that my wincing would be mistaken for what it was fast becoming: a throbbing headache.

Faculty Forum: Assessment Metaphors We Live By

The range of assessment metaphors circulating in higher education reflects the diversity of understandings of assessment. Assessment is a tool for measurement, a process for improvement, and a medium of communication. Its practice at once requires and produces a “culture” of assessment, evidence, accountability, or learning, and students correspondingly figure as participants, objects of study, consumers, or agents of their own learning.

A Price above Rubrics

British universities never challenged the Orwellian terminology of managerialism. The outcome is the disintegration of a higher education system that was once a jewel.

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