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First, Do No Harm
By Alexander C. McCormick
“A well-designed accountability system motivates substantive change, not merely gaming the system.” Alexander McCormick, director of the Carnegie Classifications of Institutions of Higher Education, issues this cautionary note as part of his recent article in Carnegie Perspectives.
Responding to the current debates about accountability and assessment spurred by the release of the report from Secretary Spellings’ Commission on the Future of Higher Education and broader calls for greater accountability in Washington DC and around the country, McCormick cautions policymakers and educators to carefully consider what performance measures are used—and what they are used for. McCormick notes that, while some recent college-quality initiatives show promise as tools for adequately assessing aspects of the college experience, “reporting scores [from such assessments as the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) or the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA)] to the government will do far more harm than good.”
McCormick warns particularly against “transforming a diagnostic exercise into a grading and ranking” of institutions. He suggests that this inevitable ranking that is likely to occur with any simplistic public reporting of assessment “scores” will likely result in a distortion of the whole assessment process. Colleges will either “act in their own self-interest to make their college look good” or “simply opt out.”
McCormick believes that assessments such as NSSE and CLA can, indeed, provide to faculty and college leaders valuable information. But, he concludes, “not all diagnostic information is suitable for accountability and consumer information, and a ham-fisted approach like this could sabotage important efforts to diagnose and improve colleges and universities.”
Alexander McCormick is currently a senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and will become the director of the National Survey of Student Engagement in January 2008.
Carnegie Perspectives is published online by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The full text of McCormick’s article can be found on the Carnegie Foundation Web site. For other resources on assessment, see AAC&U’s Web site Assessment Resources page. |
