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CEOs all administer examinations to potential hires to test their knowledge and skills, so why couldn't they just coordinate among the Fortune 100 companies to publish their collective results? They could publish the names of the colleges whose graduates do well. The annual U.S. News & World Report rankings of colleges would pale by comparison! participates in an institutionwide general education assess- ment. The faculty from each discipline identify a set of com- mon cross-disciplinary core competencies that all undergrad- uate students graduating from the college should acquire by the end of their four years. Like the faculty of other programs at the college, business school faculty have mapped these abil- ities onto specific assignments that occur periodically throughout a student's academic career. They then take sam- ples from students' work to determine whether those compe- tencies are coming through. Likewise, King's College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Times Are Quickly Changing Just 20 years ago, everybody knew what a college or univer- sity was supposed to look like—students attended class, sat in lecture halls, listened to professors, turned in assignments, and took exams. Today, however, that standard image is fad- ing quickly, as diverse incarnations of the educational process are gaining ground. New course delivery mechanisms that use experiential learning, team projects, and distance learning technology simply don't fit the mold. That means that our community perception of what it means to be a university is breaking down. Therefore, it has become increasingly impor- tant that educators develop a systematic and visible approach, not to teaching itself, but to evaluating whether that teaching is yielding the right learning outcomes. The prospect of starting an integrated program of learning formance was seen as poor by public policymakers. This same outcry is now beginning to be directed toward higher educa- tion institutions. But in our case it is less because of overtly poor performance than because colleges and universities are developing a reputation for maintaining a sense of secrecy about what they do, how they teach, and what students actu- ally learn. As an enterprise in higher education, we could gain more public credibility and support if we were to demonstrate that we investigate our own effectiveness and that we respond promptly when the results aren't good. I have been connected with the debate surrounding assessment of learning outcomes since 1985, when it first came into national prominence. Today, there's much more ongoing debate on the subject, as it becomes clear that obtaining a high-quality college education is a public policy issue. There are increasing doubts about the quality of what's being produced by our higher education institutions, espe- cially by elite groups, such as top CEOs. When we look at the need for assessment in my Center, we often begin by interviewing business leaders. We ask, "What should higher education be delivering?" Often, we find that business leaders say that although college graduates know the details of their disciplines, they lack good communication skills, they're not good at teamwork, and they lack appropri- ate leadership skills required for businesses today. I was recently part of a project that was investigating the assessment can seem overwhelming. It's true that determin- ing objectives for each course in each discipline, from core courses to electives, is challenging. Likewise, the prospect of charting those objectives from year to year is a daunting task. But that shouldn't be an obstacle to getting started. Institutions that have built comprehensive, highly integrated, well-documented systems of assessment have been developing their practices for years. They started with small steps, perhaps with only one course, and worked their way up to the whole. Elementary and secondary schools have already been bar- raged by externally mandated assessment because their per- feasibility of a National Assessment of Educational Progress for higher education—something already used in primary and secondary education. A number of CEOs were part of a roundtable discussion on the topic. During this discussion, they began to compare notes: They all administer examina- tions to potential hires to test their knowledge and skills, so why couldn't they just coordinate among the Fortune 100 companies to publish their collective results? They could pub- lish the names of the colleges whose graduates do well. The annual U.S. News & World Report rankings of colleges would pale by comparison! That was quite an idea, and one that all colleges and uni- versities should heed. The federal government is already whis- pering about the possibility of standardized assessment of higher education; business is already debating about the need for exit exams. So, if higher education institutions fail to offer a viable alternative by voluntarily integrating learning assess- ments into their programs, the danger is that someone else is going to do it for them. ■ z Peter Ewell is vice president of the National Center for Higher Educa tion Management Systems in Boulder, Colorado. BizEd JULY/AUGUST 2003 33