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Understanding what they know
October 26, 2007
Alex Usher, Vice President, Educational Policy Institute
Though it didn’t get a lot of attention on this side of the pond, a very intriguing report appeared in the UK this month which may presage things to come here as well. It’s the Burgess Report, put out by Universities UK, and it recommends some sweeping changes in the way student achievement is reported on academic transcripts.
The specifics of the report aren’t that important – the British system of summing up three years of work into a single summative analysis (i.e. “first,” “upper second,” “lower second,” etc.) is indeed somewhat bizarre and archaic and is in desperate need of an update. But more broadly, the Burgess report bravely takes an overall look at the whole notion of student assessment.
Think about it for a moment. What does an undergraduate degree actually certify to an employer or even a graduate school? What does any degree really say about the acquired body of knowledge or habits of thinking that its holder possesses? If so, what?
The problem, at the end of the day, is one of curriculum. As institutions have offered increasing amounts of cafeteria-style choices in course selection, it becomes harder and harder to describe to people what a university degree means. Does it mean anything other than that the holder managed to pay fees for four years and attended a number of classes?
At more prestigious institutions where the notion of curriculum is taken seriously (e.g., Harvard), there are still regular debates about what should be in the core curriculum and therefore – in effect – what every Harvard graduate should know. This is completely absent in Canada. Not a single institution in the last ten years has – to my knowledge – ever engaged in a debate about a campus-wide curriculum common content to all students and hence allow institutions to say “here’s what a Memorial graduate knows/can do.”
Other countries have tried to define university outcomes in terms of skills and competencies that people should have at the end of a first degree. The West Report in Australia had a pretty good set of such recommendations. In England, the much-maligned Quality Assurance Agency did a very good job at the start of the decade in creating national “subject benchmark statements,” in which academics from a single discipline across the country came together to agree upon expectations of minimum standards of what should be expected of graduates in each area. Again, North America has nothing like it.
But if we insist upon outcomes assessment for institutions, we’re going to need these sorts of external benchmarks to see whether or not students are in fact learning what they are supposed to over the time they are in universities’ hands. And, subsequently, we’re going to need to find more interesting and innovative ways of reporting on that via transcripts.
The Burgess report does not go as far as all this – indeed, it is in some ways a very cautious document which talks a lot about the process required to get a new national framework for transcripts working (it’s only a “framework” because the plan – quite rightly – is to set down some common elements of reporting while encouraging institutions to experiment with their own forms of reporting on student achievement). But it’s a question we all need to ponder. As undergraduate degrees become more common, the demand for forms of assessment which can permit solid differentiation between Bachelor’s candidates will grow. High schools – with relatively tight curricula and province or statewide curricula and testing - can get away with just publishing course names and grades. Universities – with little standardization and an increasingly smorgasbord approach to credit accumulation – don’t have that luxury.
As it stands, most institutional transcripts certify very little about students competencies and history other than time served. It’s time people on this side of the ocean began giving some more serious thought as to how to accurately describe, quantify, and summarize the education undergraduates are receiving. Given what they’re paying, we owe them that.
Have a good weekend.
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