Category Archives: Accountability

Inside Higher Ed: Margaret Spellings, Where Are You?

Walking from meeting room to meeting room at this week’s annual conference of the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, and scanning the program, it was impossible not to be struck by the fact that a good half of the hundreds of sessions have embedded in their titles the words “student outcomes,” “assessment,” or “accountability.”

Granted, that may not be surprising given that, as noted by Steven D. Crow, the commission’s departing president, the theme of the meeting was “Finding Common Ground: Accreditation, Assessment and Accountability.”

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Arkansas Democrat Gazette: You’re accountable, Beebe tells colleges

Gov. Mike Beebe said Tuesday it’s starting to sink in with college presidents that he wants to hold them more accountable on performance.

Beebe in May announced his plan to develop a new higher education funding formula that would tie at least some state dollars to retention and graduation rates. He wants to present a plan to the Legislature in 2009.

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The Chronicle: After Escaping the Imposition of Standardized Measures in 2007, Colleges Begin Worrying About 2008

Congress rescued the nation’s colleges and accreditors last year when the Bush administration threatened to impose new rules for measuring academic success. At an annual conference here this week, accreditors heard repeated warnings that the danger has not passed.

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USA Today: Employers want new way to judge graduates beyond tests, grades

Colleges have been scrambling over the past year to respond to recommendations from a national commission that they be clearer to the public about what students have learned by the time they graduate.

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Inside Higher Ed: Another Call for Assessment

As college associations unveil new ways for colleges to report on what they do, and Congress debates how much accreditors should ask of colleges, an effort has been going on for months to craft a national statement on student learning and assessment.

Drafts of the document leaked to Inside Higher Ed, by educators concerned about the statement’s direction, suggest that colleges commit to “gather evidence” about the success of students in meeting certain education goals; that the evidence should be shared widely and used by accreditors; and that in some cases this material should be used to compare institutions. “Such information and evidence allows comparisons, where appropriate, between and among institutions and may suggest areas for improvement,” the draft says. At the same time, the document asserts that the “primary responsibility for achieving excellence” rests with colleges, and not outside bodies.

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Baltimore Sun: Can colleges pass the test?
Standardized exams seek to track learning during students’ careers

College students in Maryland and across the country might soon be taking standardized tests to determine how much they’ve learned on campus – part of a national effort to hold universities accountable for student achievement.

An association representing more than 200 large public universities is expected to vote today to recommend that its member colleges adopt standardized tests and within four years begin to publish the results. A group representing another 400 colleges will take a similar vote this month.

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Inside Higher Ed: Accountability System Launched

A new way for students and their families to compare colleges — and for legislators and others to evaluate them — was unveiled Sunday with the start of a campaign to get institutions to sign up to use it.

“College Portrait,” as the effort is called, is a template for information that public, four-year institutions will provide online in an easily comparable way. Some of the information — statistics on the student body, figures on college costs — is fairly commonly found (if not always in comparable ways) on colleges’ Web sites today. But the program also includes a new method for measuring graduation and retention rates and, controversially, a requirement that institutions that choose to participate conduct and release results from standardized tests as a means of measuring the learning that goes on at their institutions. Those tests would be administered to small, representative cohorts of students — possibly 100 or fewer freshmen and a similar group of seniors — and would not be generally offered or required of all students.

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Inside Higher Ed: A Worldwide Test for Higher Education?

For much of the last year or two, debate has raged among American higher education officials and state and federal policy makers about the wisdom and practicality of creating a system that would allow for public comparison of how successfully individual colleges and/or programs are educating their students. Many college leaders have rejected the push, which has emanated primarily from the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education and the U.S. Education Department, on the grounds that the nation’s colleges and universities — two-year and four-year, public and private, exclusive and open enrollment — and their students are far too varied to be responsibly and intelligently measured by any single, standardized measure (or even a suite of them).

But the thirst among politicians and others seeking to hold colleges and universities more accountable for their performance is powerful, and it is not merely an American phenomenon. Proof of that can be found in the fact that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has convened a small group of testing experts and higher education policy makers who have met quietly in recent months to discuss the possibility of creating a common international system to measure the learning outcomes of individual colleges and university systems, along the lines of the well-regarded test that OECD countries now administer to 15-year-olds, the Program for International Student Assessment.

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Inside Higher Ed: Questioning College-Wide Assessments

The skills-based assessments recommended by the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education could be “misleading” to students and parents because it would measure student performance on an institution-wide level rather than more specifically by area of study, a new study of one of the nation’s largest public university systems suggests.

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Vancouver Sun: Another private college faces a government probe

Another private college in B.C. is under investigation for allegedly offering university degrees without authorization. Advanced Education Minister Murray Coell has confirmed that Rutherford College in Richmond is suspected of offering degrees as Rutherford University in violation of provincial law, and he’s hired lawyer Deborah Lovett to investigate.

It is the second time this year the ministry has asked Lovett to inspect a post-secondary institution. Her report on Lansbridge University forced its closure earlier this year shortly after its sister school, Kingston College, was ordered to shut down.

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Inside Higher Ed: Key GOP Senator Warns Spellings

For months, ever since the U.S. Education Department began an aggressive push to change federal rules governing accreditation, higher education lobbyists have been urging members of Congress to rein the department in. Using the federal regulatory process to force accreditors to set minimum levels of acceptable performance by institutions on measures of how much their students learn, and to ensure that the institutions they oversee do not discriminate in their transfer policies against academic credits of students from nationally accredited institutions, exceeds the executive branch’s authority and tramples on Congress’s, college groups have argued.

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Inside Higher Ed: AAU Gets on Board

Research university group plans voluntary accountability system, but Spellings panel chairman knocks pace of reporting.

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The Chronicle: Italy’s Cabinet Approves Bylaws for New National Assessment Agency for Universities and Research

Italy’s cabinet approved on Thursday the bylaws of a national assessment agency for universities and research, whose formation is a key element in the government’s campaign to raise the international standing of its academic institutions.

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Inside Higher Ed: A Defense of Standardized Tests

The last year hasn’t been a good one for the standardized testing industry, what with SAT scoring errors and more colleges dropping the test as a requirement. But on Thursday, the journal Science published a study backing the reliability of standardized testing in graduate and professional school admissions.

The study, a “meta-analysis” examining thousands of data sets on a range of tests, found that test scores are a better way to predict graduate and professional school success than are college grades, which may be influenced by grade inflation or the relative competitiveness of different student bodies. The study concluded that the most reliable way to admit students to graduate and professional school is a combination of using test scores and college grades. In addition, the study found that these tests predict just as well for minority and white students.

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