Red herring arguments against assessment

Here's another brief exchange on the ASSESS listserv about logical fallacies in arguments made against assessment.

This is a continuation of the discussion on logical fallacies and emotional responses that was initiated two weeks ago. I will use this discussion to develop a workshop on how my assessment peers address these issues. I will share the workshop with the assessment list serve when it is completed.

I will post a brief description of the fallacy and provide examples of how the fallacy might express itself. I would be interested in receiving additional examples of this type of logical fallacy and know how list serve participants have addressed this fallacy. I will continue to present fallacies until I have exhausted my list and then ask for a list of your favorites. I would like to address discuss emotional responses and how to address them at a later time.

This time I would like to suggest the “Red Herring” fallacy.“ This fallacy occurs when an attempt is made to divert attention to another issue that is irrelevant to the topic under discussion. When this occurs you find yourself dealing with a lot of extraneous issues. It is equivalent to changing the topic when you are no longer winning the argument.

This sort of reasoning is fallacious because it simply provides a distraction that misdirects an examination of the issues.

Example 1

As mentioned by one of the posts on the last discussion many times illogical responses are a result of people simply not wanting to do assessment. This position represents a boundary conflict because the people are resisting the additional workload associated with documenting assessment and we representing an institutional need that must be addressed. Since it is more difficult to justify lack of support for institutional needs people may attempt to shift the focus of the discussion to values or philosophical beliefs. By representing the boundary aspects of the conflict as a values conflict it not only limits possibilities for resolution but misdirects the focus of the discussion. This represents a red herring because it diverts attention from the source of the conflict to another more difficult to address area

Example 2

We cannot assess student learning because our learning outcomes are dependent upon the quality of our students. We need to increase standards before we can be expected to perform assessment and besides we have transfer students we cannot be held responsible.

Example 3

Why doesn’t the Assessment Office just give a standardized test? The institution will support the test administration. This may ignore the fact that there is no alignment between the these generic tests and the curriculum. Furthermore, even if the test was given there would be no commitment to using the data for programmatic improvement. This would represent a herring because it distracts from development of meaningful assessment through focusing attention on simply giving a test.

Looking forward to your responses. Thanks

"Straw men in the field, scape goats in the pasture, red herrings in the lake, this has got to be a conspiracy."

Stephen Zerwas
Director of Academic Assessment
The University of North Carolina Greensboro

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Oh, I’m sure we can add to this one:

Example 1:

We didn’t need this assessment back in my day when people respected education. Nowadays professors get no respect. It’s all sports stars and Hollywood types some of whom have no talent whatsoever, and what about all those reality-show clowns? The classics aren’t respected anymore. Politicians, who are ignorant, just want irrelevant data so that they can browbeat us all the more. This is part and parcel of the degraded state of culture in this country. Moreover, when I was a student they said “look to your right and look to your left—one of you won’t make it.” You were expected to work hard not to be that one and you would be that one if you didn’t have the goods. Now we are expected to keep all three and show that they learned something, whether they had any ability or not.

Example 2:

The Federal (or state) government is just doing this because they want to cut our funding. They want a dollar’s worth of control for a dime’s worth of support. They are increasing regulation in all areas—just look at the requirements of the new Higher Education Act. We’re going to have to hire extra staff to meet all these silly disclosure requirements and then we won’t be able to afford to hire the faculty we need. Our class sizes will increase and the students won’t get as good an education. What good does all this do? It just takes time away from the time we can spend with our students, and everybody knows that is the main thing promoting quality in education.

Each of these has a valid point but not one that prevails.

Patricia DeWitt
Asst VP for Planning and Institutional Effectiveness
Shorter College