Don’t Test Me

In recent months, the U.S. Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education has proposed the implementation of standardized testing at colleges and universities across the nation. This is part of a larger effort to increase their accountability to students, parents, employers, and the public at large. While the government’s concerns about the quality of higher education are understandable and well-intentioned, the use of standardized testing is an inappropriate and ineffectual solution that should not be pursued.

Two main arguments have been made in support of testing: first, that the results will assist consumers in gauging the value of education from particular institutions, and second, that something should be done about the substantial portion of students who are leaving college without even a basic set of skills, such as the ability to read complex texts or draw inferences.

On neither account is standardized testing the right answer. The value of the college experience, by its very nature, cannot be easily categorized or quantified. Ranging from heavily science-oriented schools like the California Institute of Technology to exclusively arts-based institutions like the Rhode Island School of Design, colleges include within their ranks a vastly diverse array of academic emphases.

Even within each institution, a multitude of disciplines exists, making it necessary for students to select only a few specific areas for study in greater depth. The diversity of experiences offered makes it exceptionally difficult to develop a test or even a set of tests that are general enough to apply to all students’ college experiences while at the same time not so elementary as to be pointless.

And none of this, of course, recognizes the fact that much of the value associated with the college experience falls outside of the academic realm. Thus, even if a standardized test could be administered to gauge students’ academic progress, it would still not accurately reflect the added value of the college experience. This risks the potential misinformation of prospective students, their parents, their future employers, and anyone else interested in appraising an institution of higher learning.

Moreover, while it is true that no students—whether at Caltech or RISD, an Ivy League school, or a community college—should be graduating without at least some basic knowledge or skill sets, the observed deficiencies in their baseline ability are reflective of failures in a separate domain, namely that of secondary education.

Because America’s high schools are where basic reading, writing, and quantitative skills should be taught, they are also where the accountability for substandard performance in basic skills should lie; illiterate and innumerate students should not be receiving diplomas or making their way to college in the first place.

Remarks made earlier this month by the Commission’s chairman Charles Miller suggest that he is now backing away from his earlier call for nationalized standardized testing. This is a welcome turn of events that we hope will lead to an official abandonment of the proposal and a move to more constructive approaches to higher education reform.

Rather than wasting human and financial resources on the creation of more bureaucracy, the government should redirect and refocus its efforts on actually improving higher education. This can be done by further developing its financial assistance programs to enhance the accessibility of higher education to students across the nation. In the meantime, businesses , which were some of the prime drivers of a move for standardized tests, should find better ways of gauging the proficiencies of college graduates and prospective hires instead of expecting the federal government to do the job for them.

Finally, students themselves should take greater responsibility for their education. What makes college so valuable in the first place is the opportunity that it affords students to define their own academic paths and devote their efforts to the pursuit of true interests. Accountability, then, should be stressed not only on an institutional level, but also on an individual one; the onus ultimately falls on the students themselves to make their college learning experience a meaningful one.