Whether it’s the TAKS, SAT, ACT or PLAN, standardized tests are unavoidable in high school. Students dutifully complete one Scantron after another, guided through this rite of passage by the knowledge that college will be different. But if U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings gets her way, the standardized tests will not end in high school.
Spellings’ Commission on the Future of Higher Education recently released a report that would support universities with extra funding for those who publicly report student progress.
In response to the report, the SMU Center for Teaching Excellence hosted a round-table discussion Wednesday to talk about how the university should respond.
The main question posed by moderator Ron Wetherington, director of the CTE, was if the faculty could identify an effective university-wide test to quantify student learning at SMU.
Sentiment in the room was that universities should be exempt from uniform standardized testing, because with so many areas of study it is nearly impossible to create an effective test.
Caroline Brettell, Dean of Dedman College, echoed this sentiment saying, “There is a lot more going on in universities than outside politicians know, not to say we can’t do better, but we think for ourselves what we want.”
The goal of the test, according to Spellings, is to provide information for prospective students “decision-making” and to “hold schools accountable for quality.” Brettell counters this point stating that such a test would rob U.S. higher education of its “creativity,” which is envied by the rest of the world.
If a test is instated, the faculty wonders what would drive students to do their best on the exams. The University of Texas pays a sample of students $50 to $100 to take the Collegiate Learning Assessment to make sure that all UT campuses are teaching similar information. Even then, with no grade being given or award for doing well, administrators cannot be assured that students would really try to perform well on the tests.
Faculty member Patricia Mathes believes that at “some point [the test] would become a prerequisite to graduate, much like TAKS.” Brettell, however, believes that the test would be “not about the student passing, but rather, the university.”
Since the faculty agreed that a uniform test would be detrimental to the university, they considered alternatives for what would measure university performance. Wetherington thinks that the university should “preempt” what Spellings is asking for by coming up with its own standards. Meadows School of the Arts is already working on this by having each teacher publicize objectives for the class on the syllabus in order to decide at the end of the semester whether or not the objective was met.
Another idea was to have seniors take “capstone courses” to wrap up majors and decide if value was added to their education during their time at SMU. Some departments offer these courses in the form of Senior Seminar, while others would have to increase faculty to offer such a course. Currently, the few existing capstone courses and exit interviews are being used to measure student satisfaction.
“The university needs to follow the dean of Meadows in the need of being precise and measuring student performance,” Wetherington said.
