Global Security and Intelligence Studies Volume 4, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2019 | Page 19

Global Security and Intelligence Studies
So, the rise of assessment in the United States is driven by the confluence of
these factors. Colleges and universities have continued to seek ways to address the
complex task of measuring student knowledge levels. Government institutions,
responding to political pressures, sought mechanisms to ensure measures of accountability,
so that public funds were not being wasted. The rise of accreditation
bodies can be seen as a way of mediating these two issues (Shavelson 2010).
Critics of Assessment
The power of these accreditation bodies is not viewed by everyone as a positive
development. Some suggest that these accrediting bodies actually inhibit the assessment
of student learning. In his 1996 book, Crisis in the Academy, Christopher
J. Lucas criticized the accreditation system as too expensive, onerously complicated,
incestuous in its organization, and not properly tied to quality (Lucas 1996).
Similarly, a 2002 report by George C. Leef and Roxana D. Burris of the American
Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) argued that the system does not ensure
or protect educational quality, while still imposing significant costs (Leef and Burris
2002). Robert Shireman, a senior fellow for the Century Foundation, recently
echoed this sentiment. He argued that accrediting agencies often require institutions
to reduce SLOs to meaningless blurbs which “prevents rather than leads to
the type of quality assurance that has student work at the center” (Shireman 2017).
Some suggest that this pressure leads to poor methodology in the attempt to
demonstrate the causal relationship between education and student learning. This
is not to suggest that the education does not facilitate student learning, only that
the data gathering and analysis structures that are in place are poorly constructed.
David Eubanks, a board member for the Association for the Assessment of Learning
in Higher Education, criticized the approach to assessment structures, noting
“the whole assessment process would fall apart if we had to test it for reliability and
validity and carefully model interactions before making conclusions about cause
and effect” (Eubanks 2017, 6). He argues that applying common sense to dubious
data is akin to a Rorschach test.
Another critique of the current accreditation-driven assessment structure
is that it has little impact on educational improvement. As Banta and Blaich noted
in a study of assessment reports: “We scoured current literature, consulted experienced
colleagues, and reviewed our own experiences, but we could identify only
a handful of examples of the use of assessment findings in stimulating improvements”
(Banta and Blaich 2011, 22). Indeed, some suggest that the 6 percent of improvements
that were found in this study actually overestimate the impact because
the assessment reports were not selected randomly (Fulcher et al. 2014).
Indeed, among these scholars, the current model is self-sustaining due to
financial incentives. As Upton Sinclair once noted, “it is difficult to get a man to
understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding.”
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