While assessment is embedded into the body of education, when it first appeared I thought it would be another fading academic. When it first appeared, a modified version of the classic insult against teachers sprung to mind: “those who can do; those who can’t do teach; those who can’t teach assess.” In those early days, most professors saw assessment as a scam: assessment “experts” getting well-paying positions or consulting gigs and then dumping the tedious work on professors. Wily professors responded by making up assessment data and found no difference between the effectiveness of their fictional data and real data. This was because they were both ineffective. I, like many professors, found myself in brave new world of assessment.
I eventually got dragged into assessment. At the start, I did the assessment paperwork for the Philosophy & Religion unit at my university. In 2004 I was given an eternal assignment to the General Education Assessment Committee (GEAC) and then made a co-chair. This resulted in me being on all the assessment committees. As such, I now have over 20 years of assessment experience.
On the one hand, I retain much of my old skepticism of assessment. Some of it still seems to be a scam and other aspects a waste of time. There is money to be made in this area, money that is taken from other areas of education. Assessment also takes faculty time that could be used for teaching or research. There are also good questions about the effectiveness of assessment, even when it is done sincerely.
On the other hand, my reading of Aristotle and experience shows there is some merit in properly done assessment. The good and proper purpose of assessment is to evaluate the effectiveness of education. This is reasonable—as Aristotle noted in his Nicomachean Ethics, if one aims to become a morally good person, one needs an index of progress. In the case of virtue, Aristotle used pain and pleasure as his measure: if you feel increasing pleasure at doing good and increasing pain at doing wrong, then you are making progress. This indirect measure (to use an assessment term) enables one to assess moral progress. In the case of education, there must also be assessment. Otherwise you don’t know how well you are doing in your role as an educator.
One mantra among the assessment elite is “grades are not assessment.” While this has been challenged, it remains a common belief. To be fair, there is some truth to this. One concern is that grades can include factors irrelevant to assessing the quality of work. Professors sometimes give extra credit that is not based on merit. Factors such as attendance and participation can go into grades. For example, my students can get +5 points added on to a paper grade if they turn the paper in by the +5-bonus deadline. If I used the extra credit grade for assessment, it would not be accurate. However, it is easy to adjust grades so that they serve a legitimate role in assessment. For example, knowing that the +5 bonus papers have a +5 bonus allows me to assess them using the grades by subtracting 5 points. I, of course, assess the papers using rubrics, if only to avoid getting a lecture on why grades are not assessment.
Another concern is that professors can be inconsistent in their grading. For example, the way I grade papers is different from my colleagues because I am a different person with different experiences. A paper I grade as an 84 might be graded as a 79 or even a 90 by a colleague. Part of this can be due to a professor being a harder or easier grader; part of it can be due to different standards. While this is a concern, the same problem applies to “non-grade” assessment. Different assessors will be harder or easier in their assessment. While having a standard rubric can help offset this, the subjectivity remains whether you call it a grade or an assessment. Another approach is to have several faculty assess the same class work. While a good idea, schools rarely compensate faculty for this extra work and assessing the work of multiple classes would be a part time job by itself.
There are also concerns that some faculty are bad at properly grading work and hence their grades are not legitimate assessments. While it is true that some faculty are bad at grading, this is not a problem with grading but a problem with the faculty. Addressing the shortcoming would fix two problems: bad grades and assessment. There is also the fact that people can be just as bad at assessment, especially when people are assigned to assess work outside of their field. For example, if an English professor were asked to assess philosophy papers for critical thinking or an engineering professor were be asked to review biology lab reports for written communication.
In closing, assessment can be ineffective and a waste of resources. But it seems to be a fixed feature in education, although the support and enthusiasm for it seems to be fading. In my adopted state of Florida, the Republican legislature is far more concerned with ideology in education and ensuring that faculty are compelled to teach the right content and forbidden to bring up taboo subjects.