SOME GOOD NEWS. Cold Spring Shops has been your one-stop-assessment-mock site, complete with a jaundiced view of holistic rubrics.

We are pleased to bring to your attention a positive development at Marquette University (motto: snipers and warriors are insufficiently Catholic.) Marquette Warrior reports that the assessment industry has been mugged by reality.

Over the past three years or so, the most nettlesome and oppressive bit of bureaucratic nonsense imposed on the faculty has been “outcomes assessment” – the requirement that each of us that taught a core course had to collect (or invent) data specific to our course in order to prove that students had achieved some defined educational “outcomes.” Just pointing to the fact that they take tests and write papers and do projects and we grade all of those wouldn’t do. Apparently, that didn’t create enough bureaucratic busywork.

This has been nettlesome because of the amount of work involved, and oppressive because of the realization that Marquette would do something so dumb.

This is priceless.

All of this was supposedly done at the behest of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, which has been demanding “assessment” from Marquette. But when the North Central Association came to evaluate the University, they were unhappy with the assessment they found.The problem became obvious when [two REMFs] sat down and went through the data that course based assessment had produced, and tried to find some common metric that would allow aggregation and produce an overall measure of what a Marquette education had achieved. There was none. The data were useless.

And the North Central Association, when they saw it, concluded pretty much the same thing.Bloom says the attempt was “well-meaning” and not the result of anybody being stupid, but that the “sense of pressure” from the North Central and the fact that “not enough people really understood learning assessment” created this fiasco.

Put another way, Evaluator Curley had read Professor Shemp's article in some journal in educational "theory" advancing the argument that "outcomes assessment" was an important metric for judging the effectiveness of a curriculum, and Administrator Moe, without taking the time to read and understand the journal article to discover the absence of empirical support for Professor Shemp's argument, convinced Provost Curly that Marquette had to have "outcomes assessment" across the core curriculum.

Perhaps the administrators at Northern Illinois will reconsider some of their assessment follies in light of Marquette's experience.