Inside Higher Ed: Testing, testing
At another time, in another place, the conversation that unfolded in a conference room at the Washington office of the Educational Testing Service on Monday, about national efforts to measure student learning, might have focused on the sort of arcane concepts that usually dominate discussions about testing, such as “design,” “validity” and “reliability.” But coming as it did just days before the federal higher education commission prepares to gather less than a mile away to (in all likelihood) approve a report that calls for a national accountability system, the ETS discussion was, for better or worse, about the politics of the possible — and the impossible.
Nominally, ETS brought together a small group of accreditors and higher education association officials to discuss the testing service’s recent report, “A Culture of Evidence: Postsecondary Assessment and Learning Outcomes,” which recommends that higher education leaders work together to create a “comprehensive national system for determining the nature and extent of college learning.”
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