Testing the limits

The New York Times reported Friday that the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, a board appointed by President Bush and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, is working on a report, due in August, that will likely recommend more standardized testing. \nJust what we need, right?\nBut wait -- we're not talking about standardized tests for third-graders, or eighth-graders, or as a high school graduation requirement, or even as a college entrance requirement. The commission is probably going to recommend that before being granted a diploma, college seniors must pass a standardized test. \nOn the surface, this doesn't look like such a bad thing. It would be useful in churning out statistics (useful for high schoolers doing their college search), it would hold universities accountable for seniors who still can't read, and it would show the federal government just what it's getting for the money it pours into higher education. \nBut here's the thing -- implementing standardized testing at the college level would turn universities into little more than diploma factories. In the same Times article, Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, said, "To subject colleges to uniform standards is to trivialize what goes on in higher education. Excellence comes in many unusual ways. You cannot apply the rules of high-stakes testing in high schools to universities."\nMr. Botstein, aside from having a wonderfully presidential name, hit the nail on the head. The skills learned in high school are very, very different than those learned in college -- and rightly so. High school is designed, ideally, to teach a broad range of practical skills to a broad range of learners. It's taught with the idea of preparing students for college while acknowledging that this may be the educational end for some students. \nCollege, on the other hand, teaches all the weird, abstract things that aren't taught in high school. For example, I can probably do less math now than I could do in high school, so a bunch of math problems would be a horrible way to test what I've learned. I'm an English major. I can write a 25-page paper on the textual importance of clothing in modern utopian literature (I did once, and it was pretty spiffy, if I do say so myself). I wrote it without breaking a sweat. What does that indicate I've learned? I learned how to write, yes, but maybe more importantly, I learned to think. I learned to read into things, to analyze things, to interpret little pieces of information in the broad scope of a very big world. If accountability is the issue, it should be dealt with school by school, not by implementing what could possibly be a very costly testing program. \nThere's not room here for me to comment on our national obsession with standardized testing, but the least I can do is express my hope that the government -- more specifically, Margaret Spellings and her cronies on the commission -- doesn't try to reduce a college education to a student's ability to fill in bubbles with a No. 2 pencil.