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Many postsecondary institutions currently administer standardized tests of general college outcomes; more than a quarter of Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) member institutions do so, for instance (Hart Research Associates, 2009). Results from such tests often serve dual purposes: They may be shared with policymakers and prospective students as evidence of student learning for external accountability purposes, and they may be used internally by colleges to inform discussions about how to improve general education programs or the general intellectual skills of their students.
Using standardized tests for accountability purposes has been contentious mainly because these tests do not measure every important outcome of higher education, and their administration is commonly perceived by faculty as an unwelcome intrusion into academic matters. However, many other faculty members and administrators recognize the usefulness of such tests for identifying academic strengths and weaknesses on important outcomes of higher education and, by virtue of standardization, for providing scores that can be benchmarked against those of other schools that admit students of comparable academic ability. By this means, best practices can be established and more widely adopted.
Jeffrey Steedle, Heather Kugelmass, and Alex Nemeth all work on the Collegiate Learning Assessment at the Council for Aid to Education (http://www.cae.org). Steedle is a measurement scientist and Kugelmass and Nemeth are program managers there.
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