CLA+
A 2012 study looking at the grades of 1.5 million
students from 200 four-year U.S. colleges and universities found that the
percentage of A's given by teachers nearly tripled between 1940 and 2008.
A college diploma is now more a mark "of social
class than an indicator of academic accomplishment," said Stuart
Rojstaczer, a former Duke University geophysics professor and co-author of the
study.
"For too long, colleges and universities have said
to the American public, to students and their parents, 'Trust us, we're
professional. If we say that you're learning and we give you a diploma it means
you're prepared,'" said Michael Poliakoff, vice president of policy for
the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. "But that's not true."
* NO... NO, IT'S NOT.
Even as students spend more on tuition — and take on
increasing debt to pay for it — they are earning diplomas whose value is harder
to calculate. Studies show that grade-point averages, or GPAs, have been rising
steadily for decades, but employers feel many new graduates aren't prepared for
the workforce. ... Only one in four employers think that two- and four-year
colleges are doing a good job preparing students for the global economy,
according to a 2010 survey conducted for the Association of American Colleges
and Universities.
Employers such as General Mills Inc. and Procter &
Gamble Co. long have used their own job-applicant assessments. At some
companies such as Google Inc., GPAs carry less weight than they once did
because they have been shown to have little correlation with job success, said
a Google spokeswoman.
At Teach for America, which recruits college students to
teach in rural and urban school districts, the GPA is one of just dozens of
things used to winnow nearly 60,000 applicants for 5,900 positions. Candidates
who make it to the second step of the process are given an in-house exam that
assesses higher-order thinking, said Sean Waldheim, vice president of
admissions at the group. "We've found that our own problem-solving
activities work best to measure the skills we're looking for," he said.
Next spring, seniors at about 200 U.S. colleges will take
a new test that could prove more important to their future than final exams: an
SAT-like assessment that aims to cut through grade-point averages and judge
students' real value to employers. The test, called the Collegiate Learning
Assessment, "provides an objective, benchmarked report card for critical
thinking skills," said David Pate, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences
at St. John Fisher College, a small liberal-arts school near Rochester, N.Y.
"The students will be able to use it to go out and market
themselves."
(The new voluntary test, which the nonprofit behind it
calls CLA +, represents the latest threat to the fraying monopoly that
traditional four-year colleges have enjoyed in defining what it means to be
well educated. The new test "has the potential to be a very powerful tool
for employers," said Ronald Gidwitz, a board member of the Council for Aid
to Education, the group behind the test, and a retired chief executive of
Helene Curtis, a Chicago-based hair-care company that was bought by Unilever in
1996.)
HNTB Corp., a national architectural firm with 3,600
employees, see value in new tools such as the CLA +, said Michael Sweeney, a
senior vice president. Even students with top grades from good schools may not
"be able to write well or make an argument," he said. "I think
at some point everybody has been fooled by good grades or a good resume."
(*NOD*)
The Council for Aid to Education, the CLA + test's
creator, is a New York-based nonprofit that once was part of Rand Corp. The
90-minute exam is based on a test that has been used by 700 schools to grade
themselves and improve how well their students are learning.
The CLA + will be open to anyone — whether they are
graduating from a four-year university or have taken just a series of MOOCs — and
students will be allowed to show their scores to prospective employees. The
test costs $35, but most schools are picking up the fee. Among schools that will
use CLA + are the University of Texas system, Flagler College in Florida and
Marshall University in West Virginia.
The CLA + is scored on the 1600-point scale once used by
the SAT "because everyone is familiar with that," said Chris Jackson,
director of partner development at the Council for Aid to Education. Instead of
measuring subject-area knowledge, it assesses things like critical thinking,
analytical reasoning, document literacy, writing and communication.
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