IT'S CALLED A MARKET TEST. Also in Atlantic's "College 2005" set is Richard Hersh's "What Does College Teach?" Mr Hersh is editor of Declining by Degrees, a project reviewed here. The article also hides behind the Pay to Read gatekeeper. It argues the case for improved assessment of universities, including a sensible proposal that universities quantify their value added ("a school is adding considerable value if it graduates more of its students than would be expected given their high school records and socioeconomic background, and adding little if it admits a bumper crop of high-achieving kids and then graduates them at a below-average clip.) Let me direct your attention, however, to two observations. Early in the article Mr Hersh notes a research finding that occasionally merits mention on these pages.

But although the researchers found wide variations in learning within each college or university, they were unable to uncover significant differences between colleges once the quality of the entering students was taken into account.

That information, alone, ought suffice to put paid to the positional arms races among colleges to simultaneously trash the U.S. News rankings and boost their standing thereon. (There is another paid article on the shenanigans enrollment managers engage in to tweak their entering classes in such a way as to make their rankings look better. Much of what is in there will make readers angry. But does it surprise that if an airline's seat-pricing algorithm is more valuable than its airplanes, that something similar would NOT be true of a university?) The money quote, however, is key to Mr Hersh's case for better assessment.

Finally, there is direct assessment of student learning that takes place constantly on college campuses, usually symbolized by grades and grade point averages. For our purposes these are nearly useless as indicators of overall educational quality -- and not only because grade inflation has rendered GPAs so suspect that some corporate recruiters ask interviewees for their SAT scores instead.

Focus on that last sentence. Remember this?

I continue to anticipate the Fortune 500 company, disgusted with spending large amounts of cash training junior executives in things the universities failed to provide, to announce that hereafter it will be recruiting in selected high schools.

High school juniors and seniors write the SATs. Somewhere, some personnel manager has to be wondering, what is the point of relying on a datum four or more years old with a noisy signal of progress since then ...