Should College Students Be Tested to Hold Institutions Accountable for Student Learning

http://www.cae.org/content/pdf/TrusteeshipMagazine.pdf
BOTH SIDES*
Should College Students Be Tested to Hold Insitutions Accountable for Student Learning?
Poor Student Mastery of Basic Skills Shows Higher Education Must Maintain Higher Standards.
Author: Stve Uhlfelder

College Are Looking at New Ways to Assess Student Learning and Institutional Effectiveness
Author: Stephen Klein

I found this article to be very interesting. MSU is currently going through an evaluation of our admissions criteria in hopes to raise our ACT admission significantly and thus deem the university as a selective destination school. Stephen Klein argues the need to identify uniformed benchmarks for institutions to determine student learning. The example he provides is the CLA, MSU currently administers the CLA. MSU's administration of this assessment requests faculty buy-in and both faculty and student support to effectively assess student learning outcomes. This is something that in the third year of administration MSU is finally grasping.

On the other hand Stephen Uhlfelder argues that there is no silver bullet to assessing student leaning and that the ultimate assessment of student outcomes is employer satisfaction surveys. These surveys provide information back to the institution on how the student applies what he/she gained academically and intellectually while attending a institution. MSU also administers a employer survey as part of the NDUS accountability measures, difficulty we have seen with this is very low response rates, as well as the data not being program specific. Data compiled from this survey simply provides the university with a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Very often the data is not generalizable to the student population as well.

If you get a chance I would like to know others views of the two articles.