Collegiate Lying Assessment?

Sherman Dorn discusses another reason why we ought to be really skeptical about using standardized instruments to measure general education learning outcomes.

On its face, the CLA looks like a plausible assessment of reasoning skills in a written context.

But a funny thing happens once you remove either type of task from the subject in which it's embedded: those who are rating student responses do not have the substantive expertise to check student assertions.

...the scoring guidelines appear to ignore the veracity of student statements. It is entirely about whether someone can construct or criticize an argument in response to prompts.

...maybe we should acknowledge that if it's to have any value, a general-education program has to have some substance, and assessments of its success need to be rooted in the areas it putatively requires some learning in. Not writing and reasoning in general but writing and reasoning about the stuff that's in the gen-ed curriculum.

And now, for the rest of the story...