<p>Next spring, seniors at about 200 U.S. colleges will take a new test that could prove more important to their future than final exams: an SAT-like assessment that aims to cut through grade-point averages and judge students real value to employers.</p>
<p>[Seriously</a>, How Much Did You Learn in College? - Businessweek](<a href=“Businessweek - Bloomberg”>Businessweek - Bloomberg)</p>
<p>I had to do something similar. I got my BSN but if I couldn’t pass the nursing board exam, my degree would have been useless.</p>
<p>Other than specific facts related to my college major (that were useless for later career choices), learning to get along with dorm mates, and just generally growing a bit older and mentally mature, I can honestly say that I didn’t “learn” anything in college. No post-college exam would have demonstrated that I was more ready for the workforce than an exam taken at the end of high school would have.</p>
<p>Speech pathologist here…was required to take an exam to gain my ASHA certification…and I also needed a masters degree to sit for the exam…and 350 hours of supervised practicum while in college, plus a supervised clinical fellowship year up on graduation from my masters program…</p>
<p>DH is a licensed professional engineer. He took the EIT (has a different name now) duri g his last term I. College, and his PE exam as soon as he had the number of years experience to do so.</p>
<p>There are MANY professions which require licensing exams of some sort.</p>
<p>Nothing that gets put on these exams. I learned a lot of architectural history, something about analyzing films, a lot of Chinese history, a lot of art history. I read the classics of political theory from Hobbs and Locke to Nietsche to Arendt. I learned the basics of German which was very useful since I ended up living there for five years. I read some big fat French novels from the 19th century. I learned the basics of women’s history. I wrote a 130 page senior thesis on low cost housing in Europe. I relearned calculus and took a basic physics course. I took an intro to computer programming. I read all of Shakespeare’s comedies.</p>
<p>All that said, the course (not for credit) that has given me the most pleasure in later life was probably the jitterbug/swing dance class I took freshman year.</p>
<p>I don’t feel that I learned much that was relevant for my life (engineering degree), and certainly don’t remember a thing from those classes. Probably the most useful things that I learned were from ROTC (leadership experiences), and Women’s Studies class in community college (self defense).</p>
<p>It seems to me that I relearned a bunch of stuff while my kids were going thru K-12. Many things that I had long forgotten, but were remembered/relearned when they would be talking about what went on in school that day.</p>
<p>I learned a ton–why would I take classes I wasn’t learning from? but I doubt a multiple choice test could begin to measure it.</p>
<p>How cynical am I about ETS finding yet another way to market their tests? Very.</p>
<p>I am also intrigued at how few people are viewing their college years as a significant learning experience, even as we stretch to make it possible for many of our children. I entered college with some personal characteristics, experiences and preliminary knowledge bases helpful to both of my majors, and exited with deeper information, ways to analyze variables, and the ability to apply the curriculum, thanks to multiple supervised internships. Employers and graduate school profs viewed this favorably. Perhaps this is more true for those whose career choice is related to their focus in college.</p>
<p>Also–the premises this is built on are unfounded–the idea that students are working hard and so learning more at less known schools because people “coast” at Ivies and the like. My kids worked damn hard at a top LAC and an Ivy, until my S stopped working at the Ivy–and you know what? When he stopped working, he failed. No one let him coast.</p>
<p>So that’s an unsupported supposition right there.</p>
<p>It’s pretty obvious to me that this is a way to throw “validity” to the credentials-are-everything world of for-profits, MOOCs, and the like, as it bumps “teaching to the test” up to the next level of schooling.</p>
<p>Bleh.</p>
<p>Put me in the “cynical-about-ETS” club. </p>
<p>Majors that require a specific knowledge base already have exams (nursing- NCLEX, accounting - CPA exam, law- the Bar). For the rest of us, so much of what we learned is hard to quantify. Hopefully, we all came out of our colleges better prepared for whatever lay ahead.</p>
<p>After reading the WSJ article about one proposed test I took a look at the website for the CLA+. It’s a 90 minute test. Here’s the description, along with a link to a sample question</p>
<p>[Council</a> for Aid to Education CLA+ Sample Tasks](<a href=“http://cae.org/performance-assessment/category/cla-sample-tasks/]Council”>http://cae.org/performance-assessment/category/cla-sample-tasks/)</p>
<p>Let’s recap: the worthiness of your entire college education is to be determined by how you perform on a single 90 minute test consisting of one 60-minute version of an AP DBQ on steroids, plus 30 minutes on document-based multiple choice questions. :rolleyes: </p>
<p>I do agree that having something to certify that people who’re autodidacts who’ve used MOOCs would be helpful. Ditto for something that could assess educational value added at the end of a degree program.</p>
<p>This is stupid. Honestly. People don’t study the same things in college. Are you going to tell me a design or CS major should come out of college with the same education as an art history or chem major? It’s not the point of a college education. So stupid. And how can we even trust the essay graders? They’ll grade on grammar and flunk the Einstein for spelling errors. Waste of time</p>
<p>The results of this test will validate that the majority of colleges in this country are stealing an average of something like $100,000 a student to give them a diploma that is worthless. When the consumer starts to balk this practice will hopefully stop.</p>
<p>The exam purports to test students’ writing ability and analytic ability. I have my doubts about a standardized test being able to measure either of those things. On the other hand, students should come out of college being able to write and analyze, but a lot of them are not gaining those abilities.</p>
<p>I’ll do my best to help them do that for the 76 new students I’m meeting next week, and I think for most I’ll do it well. But counteracting a lifetime of fractured/multi-“tasking” media/cultural ADD is difficult. Added to that the kind of learning they’ve mostly had in English classes designed to pass standardized tests, not teach meaningful writing and critical thinking (no, I don’t want a 5 paragraph essay with “three reasons” as a thesis!), and I’m telling you, it’s an uphill climb.</p>
<p>Looking at the ETS tests…bwahahahaha! The “Proficiency Profile” looks like the GRE, with a lot of multiple-choice about rewriting badly worded sentences. The iSkills assessment consists of seven “task types” starting with “Define Understand and articulate the scope of an information problem in order to facilitate the electronic search for information by…Asking questions of a “professor” that help disambiguate a vague research assignment”. </p>
<p>:eek:</p>
<p>“help disambiguate” instead of “help clarify”? “information problem”? Are these people for real?</p>
<p>Maybe they should start by running the iSkills descriptions through the Proficiency Profile. :D</p>
<p>High school English classes teach the wrong things, in my view. Creative writing and literary analysis are not worthless, but they’re unimportant for most people in ordinary life. Students need to be able to write plain expository prose, and plain analytic prose.</p>
<p>Analyzing poetry? Not useful in ordinary life. Explaining how to do something, or why a proposal is good or bad? Very useful in ordinary life.</p>
<p>Having taken a professional entry exam myself, for the RN, it measured some of the skills dealing with how to think about problems, as well as factual knowledge. Doing the job itself was a whole different learning experience, and the things I value from college have to do with more esoteric bits of learning and cultural appreciation that have enriched my life far more than my job ever will. </p>
<p>However, that more interesting person that I became made me far more emotionally intelligent and facile on the job than I would have been, had my only education been based on “job skills”. </p>
<p>This is reminiscent of some of the discussions at work regarding whether we can sum up our patient care day with check lists and fill in boxes. No…there is far more to the human experience.</p>
<p>I learned a TON - but it was particular to my area of study. A lot of degrees require a certification test of some sort. No biggie. But yea, a test to evaluate my writing ability and analytical ability? I knew how to do those things going INTO college, so I probably would have done fine BEFORE college. Silly.</p>