State Council of Higher Education for Virginia
2002
Virginia is tiptoeing into the fractious world of higher education assessment and institutional comparisons. No, they're not doing what a grown-up state should, which is pushing for measures of academic value-added that can be compared from one college to another, much as K-12 education is now doing. That remains hugely controversial in higher ed and few institutions will countenance it. (I, for one, have long felt that we would learn an immense amount by simply re-administering the 12th grade NAEP tests to people in the middle, or the end, of their undergraduate years.) But Virginia's State Council of Higher Education now requires individual (public-sector) campuses to devise their own ways of measuring student learning in certain core skills (e.g. critical thinking, writing, math) as well as well as 14 system-wide "performance measures" having to do with things like retention rates, average time-to-degree, and various spending and resource utilization rates. Thus we see, for example, that the flagship University of Virginia spends 72 percent of its core budget on instruction (and "academic support") while Virginia Tech checks in at 61 percent. Virginia Tech also reports that 48% of the research papers done in first-year writing courses demonstrated "full competence" while UVA reports that 29% of its students display "strong competence." It's impossible to make meaningful comparisons so long as each institution sets its own standards and uses its own measures. But hats should be doffed to the Old Dominion for even pushing into this sensitive field. You can find a quick summary of the most recent of these annual reports-this is the second edition-and leads to individual campus reports by surfing to http://roie.schev.edu/. And you can read a helpful overview article by Amy Argetsinger of The Washington Post ("Show What Students Know, Colleges Told," July 17, 2002) at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15879-2002Jul16.html.
