Straw man arguments against assessment

Recently on the ASSESS listserv there was a discussion about logical fallacies that often arise in arguments made against conducting academic assessment. I've compiled the contributions to that listserv thread in a Word document that you can download. I've only corrected a few spelling or punctuation errors and deleted some irrelevant stuff. Here's the post that started the discussion:

As a Director of Assessment involved with reform and assessment efforts at our institution, I have seen a wide variety of resistance that are either highly emotional or illogical or in some cases both. This has prompted me to examine logical fallacies for the purpose of identifying their components and formulating appropriate responses. I would like to elicit input from others who have seen these forms of resistance and identify what strategies were used to effectively address them.

I would like to use this discussion to develop a workshop on how to address these issues that I will share with the assessment list serve when it is completed. I would like to post a brief description of the fallacy and an explanation of why it is a fallacy and ask list serve participants to identify ways in which the fallacy manifested itself at their institution and what was done to address the fallacy. I will work my way through a variety of fallacies until I have exhausted my list and then ask for a list of your favorites. Likewise I would like to discuss emotional responses and how to address them. I will also provide illustrations of how these emotions may be expressed and ask for your input.

To start out I would like to discuss the “straw dog" or "straw man” (sorry for the sexism) fallacy. This fallacy occurs when a person ignores a person’s actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated, or misrepresented version of that position. This sort of reasoning is fallacious because attacking a distorted version of a position simply does not constitute an attack on the position itself.

Example 1

Faculty in open meetings equate academic assessment required for accreditation as an example of “no child left behind” or “Spellings.” They launch into a long digression about the ills of both of these initiatives without demonstrating awareness of how the intents, purposes, and implementation of these approaches are substantially different from academic assessment.

Example 2

A faculty member describes the deficiencies of the use of standardized tests and uses these limitations as a justification for not doing assessment at all. Equating assessment with the misuses of standardized tests and emphasizing how inappropriate it is of me, as an assessment director, to be forcing standardized tests on an unsuspecting public. This is a position that I have never endorsed or advocated. If anything I would have used this as a justification for multiple measures recognizing the limitations of any measure.

Can you give any other examples of “Straw Dog," "Straw Man” fallacies and how you have addressed them?

Looking forward to your responses. Thanks

Stephen Zerwas
Director of Academic Assessment
University of North Carolina Greensboro