Through a commission established last fall, the Bush administration is exploring whether universities should be subject to federal standardized testing.
According to The New York Times, the commission was created in light of flagging literacy statistics for college graduates and related sentiment toward greater accountability in higher education.
But professors nationwide - Tufts faculty included - are generally skeptical of standardized assessment of colleges, given the diverse and complex nature of the university experience in America.
"I'm guessing that all such a [testing] system would do is create numerous perverse incentives," Associate Economics Professor Thomas Downes said.
Tufts professors nearly unanimously opposed the tests during a faculty meeting on Feb. 22., mainly asserting that such tests would be a poor measure of an institution's academic excellence.
The form the tests would take and the uses of the tests' results remain unclear. Proposed uses of the test results have ranged from a national database to help with comparison between colleges to links with federal funding.
Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences Robert Sternberg has written extensively on the subject. He opposes mandatory standardized testing at the college level.
"[The purpose of college] is not to get high scores on standardized tests, but rather to learn about leadership skills and responsibility," Sternberg said.
He also questioned the appropriateness of transferring a testing system from America's unsatisfactory high schools to the college level. "[America's] system of higher education is world-renowned, while [America's] secondary schools are viewed as mediocre," he said.
Sternberg said he isn't opposed to the concept of administering the same test to all college students for comparison purposes, as long as "[it is] a test that truly measures what colleges are supposed to teach."
Such test scores could also help prospective students compare different colleges.
"[Standardized tests can] help you compare apples and oranges, provided you use the information with some amount of common sense," Mathematics Professor Zbigniew Nitecki said.
A host of standardized tests, such as the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE), are already used as criteria for entrance into graduate programs, but they are hardly foolproof for measuring student ability.
"Just as it is easy to misinterpret and misuse statistics, it is easy to treat test results in numerical form as far more accurate or objective than they really are," Nitecki said.
According to Ex College Lecturer Ming Chow, standardized testing is more difficult to implement for majors in the humanities than for majors in the sciences.
"I do not know how a standardized test can be implemented for the humanities and social sciences because the subjects are broad and open," Chow said. "Information is often debated and changed."
Downes agrees with Chow's analysis. "Colleges and universities do not have a uniform curriculum," he said. "I can't think of a standardized testing regime that would reveal useful information about the relative success of different colleges and universities."
Downes also believes that standardized tests would inherently favor institutions whose focus is on the skills evaluated - an inappropriate measure for intercollegiate comparison.
Philosophy Lecturer Margaret Sadock thinks that standardized tests, widely required by college admissions offices, become less relevant once students actually enter college.
"A baseline of achievement is already established at the point of entry," she said.
Despite his stance against standardized testing at the college level, Chow said he favors testing in high school. "The purpose of high school is to teach you the foundation of knowledge in life," he said.
College, on the other hand, serves the purpose of "[teaching students] how to think and live their life," Chow said.
Currently, the Bush Administration's "No Child Left Behind Act" ties student performance on standardized tests to secondary schools' level of federal funding, offering an incentive for improving student performance.
It is unclear whether similar legislation would be crafted for public universities, but supporters of the potential legislation argue that financial penalties to colleges with slipping tests scores would impel them to improve standards of education.
