Monday, November 19, 2007
The Pendulum Swings on Accreditation
Inside Higher Ed: "Last spring, as the U.S. Education Department convened a set of college officials and accreditors to negotiate possible changes in federal rules governing higher education accreditation, the dominant story line was the government’s aggressive effort to prod accrediting agencies to force colleges to measure and report more quantitative data about their success in educating students."
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4 comments:
It's unfortunate that we don't live in a perfect world where teachers push their students to their greatest potential and hold them to those standards. Then there wouldn't be any problems with institutions taking your money and then basically handing you a degree when you have not earned it.
In a No Child Left Behind era, the idea of accreditation validation seems like a reasonable step. It’s a furthering of federal government in the education system. However, the article states they are looking for ‘quantitative examples of students learning.’ Well, that is really easy to SAY. Aside from the clear lack of quantitative anything that BFA accreditation leaves you with, does the person who gets an A in a class actually learn more from the class? I confidently say no.
Our society is becoming more global and is demanding a switch from personality to data. You simply cannot quantify a person's education. Knowledge isn't measurable, really and while standardized testing and grades make an attempt, it is a sad one.
So regardless of the number of numbers that an agency or a university turns in, they are all inflated or off in some way to make the university seem better, because they know that the numbers only tell half the story. It seems then like the push for more numbers is trying to get more information in so that the numbers can tell more of the story, but really its still only half, just maybe a solidly placed half, but the rest is still up to the individual student who might understand, or might just memorize long enough to get by.
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