Matt Yglesias, the other guy who’s interested in the Bologna process,
linked to my column about the potential virtues of deciding what college students in a given course of study should learn and then finding out if they actually learned those things. Because Matt has a bazillion more readers than I do, his post generated various responses, mostly critical, along these lines:
Matt, ever heard of “assessment of learning outcomes” in higher education? Almost all institutions of higher ed have to do a boatload of assessment already in order to stay accredited, as part of the ‘accountability’ movement. So this doesn’t sound terribly new to me, except for the attempt to create cross-institution metrics. Most academics, with a lot of justification, view assessment as a waste of time–a bunch of stupid hoops to jump though, largely devised by dim
