'…[A] new and unmistakably skeptical view of the ivory tower has emerged. With it have come increasing calls for a way to hold colleges and universities accountable for the quality of education delivered to more than 17 million students.

The most controversial method - one being seriously considered by a Bush Administration commission - is standardized testing.

It is already getting a trial run with small groups of students at more than 100 institutions nationwide, including Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. [Good. I hope they publicize the results. They’ll be interesting.] Given to college freshmen and seniors, the essay-based exam is supposed to measure critical thinking and communications skills. [How about “ability to write” rather than the odious “comm…” I can’t even type it.]

Even that limited experimentation alarms many academics, who contend that the wildly diverse programs and missions of nearly 4,000 institutions of higher learning - from the Ivies to community colleges - make standardized testing worthless. [Monstrous merde. An educated person is an educated person. Everyone knows what acquisitions educated people have. Sure, someone from Princeton might have more culture than someone from Penn State; but we know when both have attained a level of thought, reason, speech, and writing that allows us to call them educated.]

"Every university is different. That's the great strength of our system," said Graham Spanier, president of Pennsylvania State University. "There's no national test that Penn State students could take that's going to help us educate them better or make us more accountable." [What a remarkably irresponsible thing to say.]

That argument has not swayed policymakers and business leaders worried that university systems in Asia and Europe are closing in fast, notably in engineering and science.

"Underlying all this is a growing suspicion that American higher education may not be as good as it ought to be, or as it thinks it is," said Robert Zemsky, a professor of higher education at the University of Pennsylvania.

Zemsky is one of 19 members on the federal commission that will make recommendations this fall on the "future of higher education" to Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.

The panel, which held a public comment session in Seattle last month and a second one last week in Boston, put testing at the top of its agenda soon after it was created last September. The chairman, Houston investment manager Charles Miller, is a leading proponent of standardized collegiate exams.

"The pressures for accountability are everywhere," Miller, a former Bush-appointed leader of the University of Texas System Board of Regents, said in a recent interview. "Evidence of the need to improve student learning is pretty clear."

He offered a litany of examples: "softening curricula," "grade inflation," and insufficient literacy skills in half of all four-year college graduates, as detailed in a study funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts released in January. Meanwhile, annual tuition hikes are outpacing inflation. [They’re charging us more to make our kids stupider.]

To his critic's ears, Miller's case for collegiate testing has a familiar ring. They say similar arguments were used to turn the No Child Left Behind program into a federal fiat, mandating extensive testing in secondary and elementary grades. Miller, in fact, helped design a K-12 testing system in Texas for then-Gov. Bush that became the model for the federal program.

Miller dismissed the comparison. The states, not Washington, should take the lead on collegiate testing by requiring it at public universities, he said. Once the big state systems prove its value, he predicted, testing will be swept by market demand into private schools.

Also, unlike No Child Left Behind, federal funding would not be tied to test results, he said.

Money, however, is undeniably part of the issue. When the commission was formed, Spellings noted that the federal government provides a third of all higher-education funding and has a right to "maximize" its investment.

"We're missing valuable information on how the system works today," she said, "and what can be improved."

That baffles some ivory tower habitues who see higher education as too preoccupied with self-examination and ranking.

"There is no enterprise in America that I know of that assesses itself so carefully and so frequently," said Penn State's Spanier, calling it "both a science and an obsession."

He cited the arduous reviews that faculty members endure to make tenure, the accreditation process, the student-satisfaction surveys, and the monitoring of graduates' efforts to get jobs. [These have nothing to do with the quality of education universities and colleges provide. And very few faculty members fail to get tenure at most American universities, making those arduous reviews beside the point.]

Better known to the public are the college comparisons made by popular publications such as U.S. News & World Report. Those rankings are based on such factors as faculty-to-student ratios, SAT scores, and alumni giving. But they say little, if anything, about how well students are learning in the classroom. [Exactly.]

Can standardized testing fill in the blanks?

That's what Lehigh University wanted to find out when it administered a standardized exam known as the Collegiate Learning Assessment for the first time last fall to about 100 randomly selected freshmen, according to Carl Moses, deputy provost for academic affairs.

Lehigh is the only Pennsylvania school to acknowledge experimenting with the assessment; none in New Jersey is known to be trying it. Most of the pilot schools are in states where college testing has become a prominent policy debate, such as Texas, New York and California.

The exam is made up of two 90-minute writing exercises. In one, students are given an opinionated statement and asked to compose an essay supporting or disputing it. The second is a real-life "performance task," such as producing a memo from newspaper clips and documents.

The test was developed by two think tanks, the Rand Corporation and the Council for Aid to Education. They employ graduate students to grade the task portion, but a software program called "e-rater" scores the essays. The same program is used to assess writing samples in the entrance exams for both business and graduate schools.

At Lehigh, it's too early to know whether the test has value, Moses said.

Skeptics wonder whether any test can accurately determine how much of student performance is the result of the classroom experience. That question leads to others: What about students who transfer? Or those who won't take seriously an exam with no bearing on grades or graduation? [Let’s not wring our hands about these things, shall we? Let’s just give the test a go.]

On the horizon, many academics see testing leading to homogenization of college curricula, akin to the teaching-to-the-test effect that No Child Left Behind is accused of having on secondary and elementary education.

"If we wanted a standardized curriculum for higher education," Spanier said, "we might as well move to China or Russia, where there's a ministry of education prescribing what we do." [I love this bit. Whenever someone suggests that our students take a test, it‘s next stop Stalingrad.]

Yet even among testing's critics are some who suggest that the academy helped bring the unwanted scrutiny on itself.

"I wish it was not necessary to have this debate," said Temple University president David Adamany, known for imposing new academic rigor on the school. "But I don't believe most universities have done a very good job identifying measures of student performance and monitoring to make sure performance is strong."

The solution is not standardized testing, many academics say, but assessments that gauge each student's mastery of a discipline. For instance, a "capstone" course, or a senior-year research paper, or a portfolio of work covering a college career. [‘Fraid not.]

Trudy Banta, a professor of higher education at Indiana University and an assessment expert, said that such assignments - combined with satisfaction surveys and scores on graduate and professional school exams - are better indicators of student achievement.

"We all love simple, easy answers," she said. "But this isn't a simple, easy issue." [Actually, yes it is. Figuring out whether a person has gained college-level knowledge and ability is really quite straightforward.] '