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 Sunday 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.
The tests would measure students' critical thinking, reasoning and written communication. They likely would be given to representative samples of freshmen and seniors, allowing schools - and the public- to measure the improvement in scores.
The assessments are part of a broader initiative called the Voluntary Accountability System, which was developed in part to reassure Washington that publicly funded higher education does not need a No Child Left Behind law with uniform exit exams given to art history and engineering majors alike.
"There was concern that they would start trying to do these grade-by-grade assessments, which I think all of us feel would be inappropriate in higher education," said University System of Maryland Chancellor William E. Kirwan, who chaired development of the project with input from more than 80 public college administrators nationally. "So it's time for us to come together as a community and develop a system of accountability."
But other educators have profound misgivings about the notion that any generic tests can capture the learning produced by a college education.
"How do you measure citizenship?" said Goucher College President Sanford J. Ungar, who called the initiative "a very unfortunate" development. "How do you measure values? How do you measure inspiring a spirit of lifelong learning?"
The proposed system is a joint effort of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. The governing board of the first group is scheduled to take up the initiative at a meeting Sunday morning in New York City.
Kirwan said he expects "most, if not all" of Maryland's public colleges to sign up.
Essentially, the Voluntary System of Accountability is a publishing project. Participating campuses would start by posting on the Internet a wide array of institutional data - such as graduation rates, student demographics and cost calculators - in a common format so students and parents could compare institutions.
Within two years, the schools also would publish the results of standardized surveys that measure student perceptions of their college experience.
The third phase of the project would require all campuses within four years to publish the results of one of three commercially available tests designed to measure student learning.
Officials emphasized that the tests are not envisioned as graduation litmus tests - such as Maryland's High School Assessments - but as one more tool for prospective students and parents to use in making college choices.
"Don't even go there, don't even go there!" Kirwan exclaimed when asked about the prospects for a one-size-fits-all graduation test. "Don't in any way associate this with what goes on in high school."
But at least one of the three standardized instruments endorsed by the initiative, the Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency (CAAP), was designed to measure whether undergraduates are prepared to move into upper-level classes.
"The idea is that students take their general education core curriculum in the first two years, and this is a way to check that they have the foundation skills ... to proceed onto upper-division coursework," said David Chadima of ACT Inc., the Iowa-based group that developed the ACT college entrance exam as well as the CAAP.
The CAAP comes in modules that test reading, writing, math, critical thinking and scientific reasoning. Several hundred two-year and four-year campuses use the test, but Chadima said many employ it as a general measure of student progress rather than as a matriculation exam.
That's how Towson University plans to experiment with the CAAP, as well as the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), an increasingly popular computer-based test that measures reasoning, problem-solving and writing. It also is endorsed by the Voluntary System of Accountability.
The third test selected as an option for the initiative is the multiple-choice Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress (MAPP) developed by the Educational Testing Service, which administers the SAT for the College Board. The MAPP exam purports to measure student progress in critical thinking, writing and mathematics.
In recent weeks, Towson administered both the CLA and CAAP exams to a sample of freshmen. Next semester, it will give the tests to a sample of seniors to gauge the "value added" by four or five years at Towson, said Katherine Doherty, the college's director of assessments.
Students who take the exams will be shown their scores, she said, but they will not be penalized or rewarded for their results.
Doherty emphasized that Towson is merely experimenting with the testing to see how valuable the data are. Kirwan characterized the testing part of the national project as a "pilot," essentially a large-scale experiment to measure the validity of the tests.
Such assurances provide little comfort to critics of the tests.
Goucher's Ungar said he fears the adoption of such testing by the public sector would put pressure on private liberal arts colleges to follow suit. Adam Falk, the Johns Hopkins University's dean of arts and sciences, said he is concerned that "the more we rely on standardized testing as our bellwether for the quality of education, the more we will value in education only those things that can be measured on standardized tests."
While lamenting the consumer culture that is now demanding a measurable return on a college investment, St. John's College Dean Michael Dink said he understands its causes.
"People are concerned about the high price of college, and parents want some assurance that students are learning something," Dink said. He feels strongly that standardized tests are not the right way to do that.
But testing advocates say it is possible to measure precisely how well liberal-arts colleges such as St. John's are succeeding in one of their primary goals - namely, teaching students to think.
Developing "higher-order skills" such as critical thinking, analytical reasoning and problem solving "are clearly what a liberal education is about," said Roger Benjamin, president of the Council for Aid to Education, which developed the CLA along with the RAND Corp.
"We can actually benchmark and measure these types of skills," Benjamin said. "Why wouldn't we want to? It's important."
Standardized learning-outcomes assessments became a hot-button issue in higher education in 2006, after a U.S. Department of Education-sponsored commission recommended that colleges report "meaningful student learning outcomes."
Many public colleges, including all those in Maryland, were already conducting evaluations of student learning and reporting the results to state higher-education officials. The evaluation methods vary widely, but a few schools have been experimenting with the nationally available tests.
gadi.dechter@baltsun.com