Bad Assessment: Moloch Version

Today’s rabbit hole reading started with an article (might be behind a paywall) in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “How Ed Schools Became a Bastion of Bad Ideas”, subtitled: “A tale of assessment, learning styles, and other notorious concepts.” The author is Erik Gilbert, a history professor who blogs at badassessment.org.

My own blogging on assessment has usually focused on formative and summative assessment of student learning, rather than Assessment with a capital A or capital ASS depending on who you talk to. I have participated in Assessment, and it can be potentially valuable, although I’m against the Culture of Assessment prevalent in our educational institutes mandated by administrators who claim these are mandated by accreditors and government regulators.

In an InsideHigherEd guest blog post, David Eubanks, who has been in the field for twenty years and has become increasingly skeptical with the current Practice of Assessment quotes a government report from the Department of Education related to proposed rules for accreditors:

Assessment models that employ the use of complicated rubrics and expensive tracking and reporting software further add to the cost of accreditation. The Department does not maintain that assessment regimes should be so highly prescriptive or technical that institutions or programs should feel required to hire outside consultants to maintain accreditation. Rather than a “one-size-fits-all” method for review, the Department maintains that peer reviewers should be more open to evaluating the materials an institution or program presents and considering them in the context of the institution’s mission, students served, and resources available. (Section 602.17b, pg. 104)

“Scrap the machine” is Eubank’s interpretation. There are better and more useful things to do with your time to aid student learning. (He provides examples from his institution in the post.) There is little evidence that it's helpful.

But the power of narrative is best illustrated, not in a factual report, but in a fictional story. The rabbit hole led me to Gilbert’s fable: “Stop Sacrificing Children to Moloch”. It’s a not-so-funny story about farmers trying to improve their harvest, and their interactions with a cadre of priests building up their temple complex. Moloch is an ancient Canaanite deity mentioned in the Bible, to portray the archaic-ness of the entire process. I won’t preview or summarize the fable – it should be read in its entirety.

As someone who studies complex systems, and being embedded in the ever-complexifying university in a time of belt-tightening and minimaxing, it’s perhaps not surprising how much time and energy gets sucked into the Practice of Assessment. Maybe I’m just jaded and I don’t think I can fight the juggernaut. I do think that perhaps we can learn something from the differences between formative and summative assessment as applied in our classrooms, to how Assessment should be applied at an institutional level. But it will require trust between different parties, something that’s in rather short supply and worsening over time.