Without assessment, great teaching stays secret

From today's CHE.

Subjecting university teaching to the kind of public, widely shared standards of quality that we routinely apply to university research remains a bridge too far. Learning is too complex, we are told, and the available measures too crude. The specters of homogenization and government control are often invoked, and for good reason. It's not hard to imagine the consequences of assessment done wrong.

It is, by contrast, hard to fully imagine the consequences of assessment done right.

UMBC specializes in the task that every parent, pundit, and lawmaker in America most wants universities to accomplish: teaching young people to become great scientists and engineers. It may already be better at this than the Ivies and Research I universities that everyone knows.

But without reliable, public assessment information to prove that to the world, UMBC has few ways of elevating its standing to a level that matches the quality of its academic work.

Without a good measuring stick, great public universities can't prove their greatness. In the long run, that means we'll have fewer great public universities than we need. That shortage won't matter much to the institutions that control the existing higher-education power structure, or to the small number of privileged students who are allowed to attend them (that is, the groups that have the most to lose from shifting the terms of prestige toward learning). But it will be a slow-motion calamity for everyone else.

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