The Initiative to End Grade Inflation is currently exploring the following issues:
1. Accountability in Higher Education: Is higher education concerned about the issue of accountability? Awareness is certainly not a problem. The Education Commission of the States reports that "state level interest in accountability is strong and growing." The National Academy of Science posted (October, 2004) on their web site that "Teaching will be more public than it ever has been before. It will be open to inspection, discussion, and increasing accountability." Furthermore, "The nature and quality of assessment will change. Faculty will teach within a culture of evidence that will place great importance on demonstrating learning outcomes."
We feel that an important step toward meeting accountability demands is to make institutional data including both the GPA and standardized test scores available to the public at large. GPA's for all courses at the University of Georgia at Athens are made public and obtained by following the link given on the Students page of this web site. In a recent treatise entitled Greater Expectations (October, 2004), the Association of American Colleges and Universities states that "Explicit learning goals and transparent assessment results could go a long way toward satisfying the demands for accountability and improved learning that are arising in many states." (Chapter four|We can Ensure Improvement By..., page 2, emphasis added) We believe that if the academic transcript is to regain the respect of society, subjective evaluation of acacdemic performance, now in the form of letter grades, should be augmented by external, objective assessment. Currently letter grades provide the only form of assessment of learning on the transcript. However, letter grades are not a legitimate form of academic assessment according to The Higher Learning Commission of North Central.
2. Academic Assessment: The No Child Left Behind Act resulted in a nationwide standardized testing program for math and English skills at grade levels 4 and 8. Results identify deficiencies but also permit comparisons between schools within a district, between school districts at the state level, etc. When testing programs are consistent between states, national comparisons are possible and can be extended to the international level. The ACT and SAT remain the primary standardized tests for use at the high school level. Not all students participate; institutions of higher education that practice open admission do not require ACT or SAT scores. Inconsistencies may exist within a single institution. Traditional day programs typically require test scores while others such as internet based programs may use open admission.
Academic assessment in higher education has no well defined, consistent policy. Assessment may include a mix of standardized tests and subjective evaluations including, but not limited to portfolios, senior culminating experiences, senior exit interviews and in-house generated exams. A variety of standardized tests exist including CBASE and the Academic Profile Test for general studeis at the freshman and sophomore level as well as the Major Field Test for the academic major in many subject areas. The Graduate Record Exam, in use for many years, covers both general and advanced studies. Education departments may choose to use Student Teaching as a senior culminating experience. Institutions sometimes include results of Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET scores) in their comprehensive assessment package which they present to accreditition teams during re-accreditation visits.
Given this situation, The Initiative to End Grade Inflation is attempting to determine what standardized tests are currently in use at the community and junior college level to assess the extent of learning for the first two years of college work. These first two years focus on the General Education component, sometimes termed the Core Curriculum, a group of courses collectively intended to improve analytical and communication skills as well as increase cultural knowledge. Community and junior colleges in the state of Missouri are chosen for this study because Missouri law requirs baccalaureate degree granting instituions to accept the junior college associate's degree in lieu of the general education requirement of the four year degree program. Hence the need for academic assessment at the junior college level is obvious. Whether accountability for presenting the results of this assessment, i.e. making them transparent, lies with the individual institutions, the oversight agencies, or state government is not clear at this time. Hence accountability, like academic assessment, remains a vague issue in higher education.