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302 private sector and non-profit employers who, by and large, say their employees need a broader set of skills and higher levels of knowledge than they ever have before. But, most surveyed said, colleges and universities have room for improvement in preparing students to be workers.

It is time for us to match our ambitious goals for college attainment with an equally ambitious – and well-informed – understanding of what it means to be well-prepared,” said Carol Geary Schneider, the association’s president. “Quality has to become the centerpiece of this nation’s postsecondary education.”

Nearly across the board, employers said they expect more of their employees than they did in the past

Comparing Rubric Assessments to Standardized Tests

First, the university, a public institution of about 40,000 students in Ohio, needed to comply with the Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA), which requires that state institutions provide data about graduation rates, tuition, student characteristics, and student learning outcomes, among other measures, in the consistent format developed by its two sponsoring organizations, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), and the Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU).

And finally, UC was accepted in 2008 as a member of the fifth cohort of the Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research, a collaborative body with the goal of advancing knowledge about the effect of electronic portfolio use on student learning outcomes.  

For students, the act of filling out those forms is sometimes a fleeting, half-conscious moment. But for instructors whose careers can live and die by student evaluations, getting back the forms is an hour of high anxiety

"They have destroyed higher education." Mr. Crumbley believes the forms lead inexorably to grade inflation and the dumbing down of the curriculum.

Texas enacted a law that will require every public college to post each faculty member's student-evaluation scores on a public Web site.

If assessment is going to be required by accrediting bodies and top administrators, then we need administrative support and oversight of assessment on campus, rather than once again offloading more work onto faculty members squeezed by teaching & research inflation.

Outcomes assessment does not have to be in the form of standardized tests, nor does including assessment in faculty review have to translate into percentages achieving a particular score on such a test. What it does mean is that when the annual review comes along, one should be prepared to answer the question, "How do you know that what you're doing results in student learning?" We've all had the experience of realizing at times that students took in something very different from what we intended (if we were paying attention at all). So it's reasonable to be asked about how you do look at that question and how you decide when your current practice is successful or when it needs to be modified. That's simply being a reflective practitioner in the classroom which is the bare minimum students should expect from us. And that's all assessment is - answering that question, reflecting on what you find, and taking next steps to keep doing what works well and find better solutions for the things that aren't working well.

Colleges and universities have plenty of tools, but they must learn to use them more effectively. That is how George D. Kuh describes the state of assessing what college students learn.

What we want is for assessment to become a public, shared responsibility, so there should be departmental leadership.

What you get from a college, by contrast, varies wildly from department to department, professor to professor, and course to course. The idea implicit in college brands—that every course reflects certain institutional values and standards—is mostly a fraud. In reality, there are both great and terrible courses at the most esteemed and at the most denigrated institutions.

With a grant from the nonprofit Lumina Foundation for Education, physics and history professors from a range of Utah two- and four-year institutions are applying the "tuning" methods developed as part of the sweeping Bologna Process reforms in Europe.

The group also created "employability maps" by surveying employers of recent physics graduates—including General Electric, Simco Electronics, and the Air Force—to find out what knowledge and skills are needed for successful science careers.

The GAO recommended that Education officials reevaluate their official estimates of the time it takes for colleges to complete IPEDS surveys, communicate to a wider range of colleges the opportunites for training, and coordinate with education software providers to improve the quality and reliability of IPEDS reporting features.

We live in a world full of benchmarks and rankings. Consumers use them to compare the latest gadgets. Parents and policy makers rely on them to assess schools and other public institutions,

"Many managers think that giving workers feedback about their performance relative to their peers inspires them to become more competitive -- to work harder to catch up, or excel even more. But in fact, the opposite happens," says Barankay, whose previous research and teaching has focused on personnel and labor economics. "Workers can become complacent and de-motivated. People who rank highly think, 'I am already number one, so why try harder?' And people who are far behind can become depressed about their work and give up."

mong the companies that use Mechanical Turk are Google, Yahoo and Zappos.com, the online shoe and clothing purveyor.

ccording to the study, teachers value collaboration, but do most of it outside the classroom. They believe they set high standards for students and believe core skills (mathematics and language, for example) are important. They believe all staff, rather than individual teachers, are accountable for student progress. They believe it would help a lot if students took responsibility for their own learning, but less than a third (compared to a very high percentage of students) believe students actually do.

"Academia is highly specialized. We don't mean to be exclusive. We are a public-serving group of people. But at the same time, that public isn't well-enough aware of what we do and who we are to evaluate us."

But the think tank is correct that taxpayers deserve to know how their money is being spent. Public-university operating costs in Texas have gone up more than 60 percent in the last two decades, even after adjusting for inflation, and professors are among the state's highest-paid public employees. The state needs accountability measures, and they must be enforced by a party other than the faculty, who, it could easily be charged, have a conflict of interest. That's what Texas A&M got right.

Moosally is right about one thing: The public isn't well aware of what she and many of her colleagues do. But they should be. That is not to say that the public will be able to understand what goes on in all of the chemistry laboratories in Texas. But Moosally teaches English at a college that is not exactly tasked with performing cutting-edge research. Houston-Downtown's mission is to provide "educational opportunities and access to students from a variety of backgrounds including many first-generation college students."

While oversight of educational quality is a critical responsibility of college boards of trustees, a majority of trustees and chief academic officers say boards do not spend enough time discussing student-learning outcomes, and more than a third say boards do not understand how student learning is assessed, says a report issued on Thursday by the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges.

While boards should not get involved in the details of teaching or ways to improve student-learning outcomes, they must hold the administration accountable for identifying needs in the academic programs and then meeting them, the report says. Boards should also make decisions on where to allocate resources based on what works or what should improve.

The most commonly received information by boards was college-ranking data

This week he posted a public critique of the NRC study on his university's Web site.

"Little credence should be given" to the NRC's ranges of rankings.

There's not very much real information about quality in the simple measures they've got."