All students breathe easier when they enter college and think the days of standardized tests and assessment exams are long gone. But don't put away those Kaplan review books just yet, Tufts.
Tufts' Center for Psychology of Abilities, Competencies and Expertise (PACE Center), run by Dean of Arts and Sciences Robert Sternberg, recently initiated a new assessment project known as IMPACTS, or Innovative Measures of Personal Abilities Cultivated in Tufts Students.
"The IMPACTS project [will] develop assessments to measure what kind of skills and expertise students gain by being at Tufts," said PACE Center Deputy Director Linda Jarvin, who is a co-principal investigator for the project.
"Our assumption is by spending four years at a residential college, you learn more things than you learn in class," she said.
Tzur Karelitz, the project director for IMPACTS, agreed that its "overarching goal is to estimate the added value of a Tufts education apart from taking courses." Assessors will be looking at how students evolve personally and socially, as well as what skills they gain that will help them in the outside world.
The newest form of the test involves short answer questions that give the subjects a certain scenario and then ask how they would react. For example, Arrash Baghaie, who handles student support for the PACE Center, said that one question on a recent exam asked what to do as a group leader with a team member whose weak performance is affecting the entire group.
According to Baghaie, who is an Op-Ed editor for the Daily, these types of questions can evaluate students' abilities better than multiple choice questions.
"We're not invested in a test or structure," he said. "We want to find the best way to measure qualities. Now we're playing with the idea of a live test."
Karelitz hopes that the test will eventually measure a variety of qualities, noting that the current version focuses on leadership skills via wisdom, intelligence and creativity.
Tufts isn't the only university trying to see if students are learning anything outside the classroom.
"There's a big growing movement to have colleges become accountable for providing some sort of development or change," Baghaie said. "IMPACTS is a small part of this trend."
As such, some colleges have begun administering tests to their students, according to a recent New York Times Magazine article entitled "No Gr_du_te Left Behind."
The article states that 40 institutes of higher education have had their students take the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a test developed in part by the nonprofit organization The Council for Aid to Education.
In addition, groups such as the American Association of State Colleges and Universities are thinking of starting voluntary programs where their member schools can administer similar assessment exams and display the results, the Times reported.
Some of the university-level interest stems from the 2005 creation of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education. Started by U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, it aims to transfer the goals of the No Child Left Behind Act to college campuses.
To do this, the commission suggested that colleges may need to be held to the same accountability standards as secondary schools, noting this is "vital to ensuring the success" of other reforms it suggests.
Robert Schaeffer, the public education director for FairTest, an organization that questions the relevance of many standardized tests, said this recent scrutiny amounts to too much attention to a problem that may not even exist.
"The politicians should tend to real problems, not invent new ones," he said. "There is no evidence that colleges are not doing a stellar job of teaching undergraduates. The notion that [they] can come up with a test to see if students [are] doing well is somewhere between naive and stupid."
Despite this national movement, Jarvin says the PACE Center is not going to develop a project based on what others are doing.
"At Tufts, we're trying to develop something that feels very well-suited for our institution," she said.
Baghaie hopes the test will show development over time, since theoretically, Tufts students without much leadership experience should not be able to ace it.
"What's important is if this test really got moving we can see people improving over college years," Baghaie said. "If the test is reliable and we don't see improvement [over time], then there's a problem and we would definitely bring it to Tufts' attention."
On the other hand, if the project does find improvement in students, Karelitz thinks it will greatly benefit the school.
"If we find that students at Tufts are developing skills unique to Tufts, then [the university will] want to advertise it," he said.
