My Love/Hate Relationship with Educational Numbers
A few months back, I wrote about how my college was going through the NCATE accreditation process. The outcome of that long event was a report about how we are doing. One area in which we were “dinged” was in our assessments of our graduate programs. As director of one of our biggest graduate programs, this report finding means that I am now under the gun to create quantitative assessments to determine the effect our Master(tm)s program has on its students (are we teaching them anything, are their dispositions and behaviors changing toward sought-after ends as a result of our program, etc?).
While such info can certainly be useful in some ways, I cringe at how there is an assumption underlying the whole process that the professor of the classes and faculty of the department can no longer be the judges of