The AACC Responds to Erik Gilbert's Commentary on Assessment

Erik Gilbert’s recently published commentary in The Chronicle of Higher Education (January 12, 2018), “An Insider’s Take on Assessment:  It May Be Worse Than You Thought,” voices a healthy skepticism about assessment that is not uncommon to college faculty and certainly not without merit.  Gilbert argues that assessment results are not really useful and don’t affect change in student learning.  As the Academic Assessment Coordinating Committee (AACC) learned when its members administered a survey about assessment practices to UC full-time faculty in October 2017, many of our colleagues agree with Gilbert’s claim.  The majority of faculty who responded to that survey indicated that the assessments they do for the institution have not been meaningful.  (An executive summary of this survey’s results may be accessed at www.utica.edu/academic/Assessment/new/.)

What the AACC takes issue with are Gilbert’s bold and emphatic conclusions that “assessment does not work” and that assessors themselves, as well as college administrators, know this and yet persist with the charade.  He offers no evidence to substantiate the latter claim, but the former one he supports with a few ripe lines cherry-picked from David Eubanks’ article, “A Guide for the Perplexed.”   However, Eubanks never says that assessment doesn’t work.  He asserts that assessment results have limited usefulness because the methods used to collect and analyze them are often poor. 

Trudy Banta and Charles Blaich, whose research Eubanks cites in his article and Gilbert later references in his commentary, found little evidence that assessment resulted in “actual change” and even less evidence of improvements being monitored for any duration of time “to see if the desired outcomes are attained.”  But they don’t conclude assessment doesn’t work.  They offer a number of plausible explanations why there is little evidence about “closing the assessment loop.”  One such possibility that AACC members concur with is that institutions might be imposing unrealistic timelines for assessment.  “Collecting and reviewing reliable evidence from multiple sources can take several years,” they write, but “state mandates or impatient campus leaders may exert pressure for immediate action.”  Banta and Blaich also note that most assessment processes focus more on collecting data and less on sharing it and engaging faculty or other stakeholders in conversations about it. 

Gilbert is misleading when he argues that “academic administrators have been acquiescent about assessment for so long” in order to justify educational offerings that do not involve traditional faculty.  He attributes the following context to the assessment movement:  expanded use of adjunct faculty, growth of dual enrollment, and an increase of online education.  In reality, the outcomes assessment “movement” in higher education has been part of the higher education landscape for three decades.  As with any paradigm shift, it resulted from and was influenced by a variety of factors:  employer perceptions that college graduates were poorly prepared; American students’ mediocre performance compared to their peers from other nations; the rising costs associated with higher education that had various stakeholders questioning its value; the landmark Spellings Commission report in 2007 that demanded accountability from colleges and universities and urged accreditors to evaluate institutions based  on their success with respect to student achievement; and two Presidential administrations spanning 16 years that required regional accreditors to “tie the renewal of accreditation every five years to serious effort on the part of colleges and universities under review to create meaningful learning outcomes measures” (Neuman).

Erik Gilbert may think it is time to dismiss assessment, but we do not believe that it will soon be eliminated from the higher education agenda or that accrediting bodies will revise their standards and no longer require programs or institutions to show evidence of student achievement and continuous improvement.  If Gilbert is correct in his perception that “assessment has not caused (and probably will not cause) positive changes in student learning,” then it is our responsibility to change that.  Eubanks proposes a “future where assessment leaders work closely with institutional researchers and scholars to create large sets of high-quality data” that he believes will meaningfully measure student achievement.  Banta and Blaich recommend that “Assessment efforts must be upgraded to ensure that they are far more likely than they are at present to lead to improvements in student learning.” 

We believe assessment should be faculty driven, where faculty in each department selects the best metrics to measure how well students are achieving both course-level and program learning goals.  We believe our efforts and our processes should be informed by research and scholarship in assessment, teaching, and learning, and not founded on opinion or anecdote.  To these ends, we invite our colleagues to join us at the March 23 Faculty Forum to discuss how we might improve our processes so that they are meaningful really do improve student outcomes. 

  

Works Cited

Blaich, Trudy W. Banta and Charles. "Closing the Assessment Loop." Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning (2011): 22-27.

Eubanks, David. "A Guide for the Perplexed." Intersection Autumn 2017: 4-13.

Gilbert, Erik. "An Insider's Take on Assessment: It May Be Worse Than You Thought." The Chronicle of Higher Education 12 January 2018.

Neuman, W. Russell. "Charting the Future of US Higher Education: A Look at the Spellings Report Ten Years Later." AAC & U Liberal Education (Winter 2017): 6-13.