University forcing professors to adopt standardized testing?

[Aster]

As part of our university's accreditor review, Big Urban College has decided to implement high-stakes, standardized testing to most of its college courses.

Yes, you heard right, standardized testing. Face. Palm. For some reason, Big Urban College's edu-wonks have decided that standardized test results for each college course will supply useful data for the accreditors and make them happy. Or something.

Anyways, this is want our edu-wonk team (of non-teaching, non-faculty "educational  specialist" staff) wants from the professors.
1. An easily gradable assignment that one professor already has for one course type. The assignment cannot be altered in any way, once selected. This doesn't sound so bad. I can just pick some low-stakes, lightweight assignment worth little or nothing. I do have MANY concerns about not being able to modify this assessment EVER, but a low-stakes, lightweight assessment should not significantly bias overall course assessment.
2. This assignment must be deliverable to students in a fully online format. Alright, now this is infringing on academic freedom and making quite a lot of assumptions about online teaching.
3. This assignment must be worth a significant amount of the total course grade. Wait, what?? Are you seriously telling me that you are endorsing implementation of a fixed, high-stakes test?? What are you, bat$%^& stupid?? What happens if students procure a copy of this test and it MUST be replaced? What happens if I want to adjust questions for whatever reason? Or adjust scoring? Or adjust the value of the assessment in the total course grade?
4. This assignment will become a required assessment component for all other professors teaching the same course type. WHAT THE $%&. You are clearly not a professional education researcher, else you would know how freaking stupid this is. You are endorsing high-stakes, standardized testing within individual college courses. General education courses. Majors courses. What makes you think that any professors individually teach and assess so identically to one another that we can all just replace one of our existing major exams with Professor Guinea Pig's major exam? What if Professor Innovative Teacher's pedagogy doesn't even have major exams? What if Professor Inverted Classroom's assessment are at a higher level than Professor Guinea Pig's major exam? What if Professor Dynamic's teaching schedule is backwards from everyone else's? What if Professor Cheating Defeater's assessment are routinely altered and edited and adding in a standardized assessment would ruin all that? What if Professor Guinea Pig's exam questions just aren't liked by every other professor?
5. The adopted standardized assessment would be used in all courses throughout the university and student testing results tracked for each professor. OH MY GOD. You're RATING professors on student test results?? Are you *trying* to boost grade inflation? What do you think all of us are going to do? We're going to teach-to-the-test and give students the answers to boost our individual professor "ratings", obviously. Have you completely missed out on the three decades of K-12 research detailing the failures of No Child Left Behind?

The more I read about Big Urban College's new plan, the more vomit I can taste in my mouth. I cannot believe how ridiculously short-sighted and incompetent-sounding this idea is of forcing high-stakes, standardized testing into regular college courses. Every professor forced to implement this is just going to teach the test to every student. There is no incentive to not do that. And having a fixed test that *everyone uses* is just so patently irresponsible that I do not even know where to begin.

Has anybody else run into anything like this before? How did it work out?

[spork]

No, I haven't.

Think of how this can make your life easier: a single exam worth 100% of the course grade, for every course you teach.

The disability services office can handle the hundreds (thousands?) of requests for test accommodations every semester. Not your problem.

[the-tenure-track-prof]

I can see how frustrating this can be but I reiterate what was just stated earlier, think about the good things that come along with not having to worry about assignments. You can now invest your time in other duties. For me, that would mean having more time for research and publishing, and I would be so grateful and happy if I could do only one online exam for each course and spend more time on research, publishing and grant proposal writing.

[kiana]

Am I reading this wrong? When you say 5. does it mean the same assessment in all sections of the same course? Or for all courses teaching the same subject? Or for courses within the same department? Or for all courses, period?

[downer]

Standardized testing can mean all sorts of things. I like the general idea. What is important is how it is implemented. No doubt administrators, beaurocrats, and educational "experts" have an almost infinite ability to make teaching worse for everyone, which will the justify a need to hire more of them. Assessing teachers for their student results does seem like the worst part of the suggestions here.

[ciao_yall]

Meh. Give it a few weeks and the whole thing will go away for all the reasons you as well as everyone above has given.

Then the edu-wonks will blame the faculty for being unwilling to be Innovative, taking advantage of Technology to have really good Data on Students so we would have had Reports to Analyze.

Instead, BUC will continue to be a Data Laggard.

[kaysixteen]

Assuming you are tenured, what happens if you just say no?  What does the master contract say?

[writingprof]

I'm with those who say you should go along with the plan, sleep the innocent sleep of children, and let the assessment goons reap the whirlwind.  Frankly, I'd love to watch one of my administrative masters try to fit a standardized test into my creative writing classes.  Why did we all go to graduate school if not for just that kind of comedy?

[present_mirth]

Would something like an online quiz on the university academic honesty policy and whether particular situations constitute cheating or plagiarism qualify? Relevant to all courses, factually objective, and basically harmless (maybe even helpful -- there's some evidence that simply going through an honor-code-related ritual of some sort makes students less likely to cheat, even if the ritual itself is trivially easy).

[Antiphon1]

What does this test measure?  I'm not sure this exercise will amount to much more than an attempt at showing some sort of student engagement rather than attempting to measure course level content mastery.  Without knowing more details it sounds like a metadata gather tool.  Get out of the way and teach your classes as you would have without the survey. 

[Aster]

This is not a survey. This is direct interference in a professor's academic freedom with his/her own course assessment.

What is being rolled out is a standardized test that all professors will be forced to adopt into their existing curriculum, and this test would be forced to become a major assessment component of each professor's individual grading system.

Here's how it is being communicated to us. The college's edu-wonk office decides that everyone teaching Introductory Psychology will be required to use Professor X's Exam #3 in place of their own Exam #3, or added in as a mandatory test if professors didn't have an Exam #3 (which is a common practice).

This new Exam #3 cannot be edited or altered by any professors, and will be required to be delivered to students only in a fully online format dictated by the edu-wonk office. The same Exam #3 will be used over and over again for all Introductory Psychology courses taught by all Introductory Psychology  professors.

Now imagine something like this system put into most every single college course at your university. Literature classes. Math classes. Foreign language classes. Imagine all of the unique and innovative ways that each professor has individually crafted his/her own assessment practices, grading systems, teaching practices, course design, etc... Now imagine someone tossing a bomb into all of that.


Office of Educational Busy-Work: "Here, add this major exam into your course. It was given to us by Professor X. No, you probably haven't seen it before; it's Professor X's exam and our office is now requiring that you and everyone else is going to use it. Implementation is mandatory. No, you can't change bad questions, questions that you don't yourself teach, or change questions to update/improve in any way. You have to make it fully accessible in an online format, also. Oh, and we're also tracking the student results of these tests."

[downer]

It certainly does sound vexing.

As with most educational fads, you can reassure yourself that it will eventually be superceded by a different policy by other administrators who need to demonstrate their importance.

Generally we cope with these things by passive resistence, ignoring policies, and being uncooperative. It works surprisingly well.

[ciao_yall]

Once the test questions and answers are out there, students will start sharing them pretty freely.

Remarkably, test scores will improve dramatically.

The edu-wonks will break their own arms patting themselves on the back demonstrating that the improvement in test scores shows an improvement in learning.

This will continue until someone decides to update the test... and all the faculty teaching quality will suddenly go downhill fast.

Everyone will wonder why.

Maybe consultants will be hired.

[Caracal]

Obviously this would be a really bad thing, but it also just seems completely unworkable. It would be possible to force everyone to adopt some assignment format for all Into to Modern European History courses, to take an example from my own field. It would be an infringement on academic freedom and a terrible idea, but you could do it. However, once you get into more specialized courses, it just wouldn't work. An assignment based on primary sources for a class on Weimer Germany can't just be translated into a course on the Roman Empire. The source bases available vary dramatically and that requires very different sorts of assignments. I'm assuming the same thing is true for other disciplines.

[San Joaquin]

Perhaps we need a thread for administrative solutions looking for a problem to solve.