If you’re a senior, you’ve probably thought once or twice about your college career, about how far you’ve come in the last four years or about all the things you’ve learned that will better prepare you for the world.
Turns out, however, that personalized educational assessments like that aren’t worth jack, according to many university and college presidents. In fact, members of the Voluntary System of Accountability oversight committee, which represents 430 public colleges and universities and is developing a program aimed at providing a standardized testing system that would give comparable data on how well public universities and colleges prepare their students, are far more skeptical about the skills you’ve managed to tuck under your belt in the last four years.
The committee, chaired by University System of Maryland Chancellor Brit Kirwan, partly aims to dissuade the federal government from moving ahead with tentative plans to implement its own system of testing college students. The standardized testing would purportedly address current problems with comparing the educations provided at different public colleges and universities in the country. The test would not focus on specialized information gained in upper-level classes but on lower-level, more basic college knowledge students from all majors should attain.
As journalists who cover a university, such a pool of data seems too good to be true, too good to pass up and too good, essentially, to question. From the viewpoint of students skeptical of the drudgery that is CORE and of the possibility of obtaining scientifically legitimate results from such a scheme, these standardized tests should clearly raise some eyebrows.
First, not all students will be subject to the testing. The current idea is that the committee will test a pool of freshmen and a pool of seniors from a given university, and then compare the scores with the hope that the seniors perform better than the freshmen. But what the committee hasn’t worked out yet is how to select those pools of students.
If they select, say, 300 freshmen randomly, there is no guarantee that all the students would show up to take the test, especially considering that there could be no punishment for no-show students as not all students are required to take the test in the first place. But if they put out a request for freshmen interested in taking the test – perhaps with some sort of bribe attached – then the pool of freshmen taking the test will not be random and will not necessarily be representative of the student body.
We all know damn well that 100 percent of randomly selected freshmen will not show up to take a standardized test. There’s probably an even slimmer chance that 100 percent of seniors would show up. This is the reason why many of the experiments conducted on the campus are completed only after the researchers bribe subjects for their cooperation.
The logistics of acquiring enough randomly completed tests to make the study legitimate seems impossible. And if the participants are not randomly selected, then what will the bribes be? If the bribe is money, you are more likely to get college students with less money, both in their own bank accounts and in their parents’. This would probably skew the results, as would most other conceivable bribes.
Students shouldn’t be entirely against the idea of standardized testing, as the results would be quite interesting. But they should be skeptical of how researchers come by those results.
