Testing the ‘Output’ of a College Is an Idea Doomed to Fail
Testing, testing, testing. . . .
As the school year began this September, after a summer dominated by E.D. Hirsch’s mind - boggling lists (“Cultural Literacy “ ) and Allan Bloom’s autobiography (proleptically titled “The Closing of the American Mind”), the nation’s colleges and universities heard rumblings from the federal Department of Education about how to measure the “output” of a college education. Precisely what, the department darkly mutters, does the undergraduate college contribute to its students, and can that “value added” be tested and measured?
There are many answers to that question. First, such a test is not needed, since colleges can already gauge how well their alumni do in graduate and professional schools and in jobs. Second, no test could cope with the enormous variety of American collegiate institutions. How can you weight physics at M.I.T., theater at Carnegie-Mellon, biology at Johns Hopkins and history at Georgetown on the same scale? Finally, no such test is possible. Intellectual growth can’t be measured like a yard of cloth or links of sausages.
Any testing instrument devised to measure the “output” of colleges would miss the effects of at least two great overarching disciplines that students undergo in the undergraduate years, no matter what they study. The first is the discipline of learning itself, of coping with four years of grouping, what the college accomplishes simply by gathering and holding its people together.
In any normal collegiate program each student will have to face 30 or more courses, each with some form of final examination or paper. In other words, he or she is asked to rise to a bewildering variety of challenges, and to concentrate both knowledge and skill to meet them. In this way students acquire a mental habit that is essential to any kind of work. They learn how to shift focus and deploy time and energy on demand, if with varying skill. They also discover how to talk and write to a precise audience, and one that has authority over the results. Freshmen twitch about examinations and final papers; seniors take them in stride. That stride is a clear “value added” by the four years of college.
The second academic value that a student gains comes from the process of taking a “major.” That major may or may not be connected with the work the student will do in after years, but any such link is adventitious and has nothing to do with the purpose of the major as seen by an undergraduate college.
A major concentration, studying a complex and organized body of knowledge in one academic discipline, makes certain that the student acquires enough intellectual control about one area of learning to teach him how much less he knows about all others. The “value added” is that he will never again mistake ignorance for knowledge. The pronunciamentos of Albert Einstein on American politics or of Carl Sagan on theology are a fair sample of what can happen when this distinction is ignored.
A second kind of “value added” comes from the gathering of any college, an element of its being that lies far beyond the reach of any test. The freshman arriving on campus steps immediately into a made group of his peers. He is cut off from home, family and the routines of high school, and has to cope with young people from other regions, or indeed other nations. He must adapt himself to different tastes, different moods, different interests and different (at times superior) skills. The sheer size and variety of the college shows a freshman hundreds of presumptive role models, all measuring rods against which he can stack himself.
If the bewildering variety of peers is not enough, freshmen must also adapt to the faculty, role models in a fuller and more established sense, and measuring rods of much larger scale against which they can plot their own growth. This can hurt. Freshmen start by “desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,” and indeed the first months of college can lead to deep discontent. But the rub of one mind upon another is a conditioning that students can escape only at the cost of misanthropic isolation, a pose hard to sustain in a lively class or dorm after the winter closes in on a campus.
This whole context of strangeness is one of the richest gifts that any college offers to its students. Remembering the Oxford of his day, John Henry Newman said he would prefer an ill-taught and weakly examined student who had spent several years in steady contact and talk with some hundreds of other bright kids, over a student who had been taught and strictly examined but experienced both in isolation.
Because of what they are and how they work, colleges are wary of testers. Tests have already cast their ambiguous and at times antisocial net around admission to the nation’s colleges. The great misnomer “aptitude test” measures only a student’s possession of limited information and a few skills. When testers reach beyond this they overreach. When they presume to weigh and measure the “value added” to a young citizen by the four collegiate years, they are doomed to be about as accurate as was the Literary Digest when it elected Alf Landon in 1936.
