I attended a workshop on Student Learning Objective (SLO) and Assessments. This is something new for college faculties and administrators when dealing with the college accreditation standards. The school has hired a consultant to help them get through the accreditation process. The consultant explained that each program and eventually each course should have 3-5 Student Learning Objectives. These are statements such as:
The learners, when tested with a Multiple Choice test, will evaluate and discriminate the answers according to their assigned reading.
Or
The learner, when tested with a Short-answer test, will assess and apply economic reasoning to contemporary issues.
Assessment deals with how the institution will assess whether the student has met such stated objectives. The instructor who teaches the class can not assess whether the students met the stated objectives or not. This creates some touchy issues such as Academic freedom and are we evaluating the instructors as we evaluate the students.
The consultant stated that assessment should be separate from faculty evaluations. This is just a way for the institution to look at itself and ask what is working and what is not?
My question which I kept to myself at the workshop is the following:
Where are the real world incentives in this project? Educators tend to be utopians and believe (or espouse) that knowledge is a reward in itself. This is true for some but not all. Also, they forget that knowledge is a tool that can be used for both good and evil.
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