Recently, SUNY proudly announced it would be the first major university system to institute system-wide assessment of math, writing, and critical thinking skills by testing a random sampling of 20% of undergraduates every three years. The trustees decided to allow each campus to design their own assessment procedures, subject to approval of course.

My only issue is I don’t know if we really have the means to shovel such large amounts of cash down the toilet fast enough. Perhaps we can create a committee to study the problem. Besides everyone knows what the deal is. Assessment … whatever… what’s the point if no means is created for addressing the problems that are discovered?

I guess we could assume that we will not discover any problems. Yeah right.

Or we could assume, probably accurately, that assessment will simply be a means for creating ammunition for trustees and politicians to assault faculty. In which case we have every motivation for fudging the results, which, of course, is the foundation of accounting practices throughout our nation from Enron to weapons inspections.

Regardless, here’s a no brainer. You will have to assess the students coming into the College in order to provide a baseline. Just focusing on writing now. When and where are you going to conduct the follow-up assessment? I suppose you could do it in FYC, at least the majority of the students will pass through the course, but then that is really only an assessment of comp not an assessment of the College’s writing instruction. Perhaps we could require every department to conduct a timed in-class essay exam in an upper division course. We then take only the seniors and create a random sample from that.

Since we already do a program assessment of composition, we could compare our results there with these results. Want to know my predictions? Okay, okay, I’ll tell you.

Modest increase from entry to end of FYC in spring of first year. Little change after that, but the interesting thing is why. What happens over the next three years? Well, virtually nothing in terms of writing instruction. The students are required to take two more “writing intensive” courses, but those courses do not necessarily include any instruction in writing, they simply require the students to complete writing assignments. More importantly, a good portion of the borderline students who are hanging on in FYC drop out or transfer. Their seats are filled by transfer students from community colleges.

So probably what you’re going to see is a slow decline in writing ability that is covered by the fact that the really poor writers are no longer in the sample.

I’m sorry…what is it exactly we are trying to measure again? Measuring students in FYC does nothing to assess writing instruction across the campus. Assessing upper division writing classes does not really measure our FYC program as a significant part of the sample will not have taken FYC with us.

Besides I can save you a million dollars and tell you write now how to improve student writing. Could the answer be develop a curriculum where students and faculty write as a community as a primary means for developing the knowledge of a course? Not surprisingly, the more time you spend writing in a meaningful way (i.e. with consequences) to others who respond in kind, the more invested you are likely to become in your writing and the better you’ll do.

Of course to do that, you only have to convince 90% of the faculty to alter their teaching methods and shift the institution’s notion of what writing and learning are. But as difficult as that may be, it would be more useful than trying to figure out how to raise the campus score on by a tenth of a point by offering more grammar workshops.