Boast Away

Like all good Ohio State University alumni (M.P.A. ‘95), I’ve been preparing to obsessively follow the highly-ranked Buckeyes football team from the pre-season all the way to the traditional blowout loss in the National Championship game on January 8th. But this year my loyalties are divided. I have a new favorite team: the aptly-named Mavericks of the University of Nebraska at Omaha, which recently had the temerity to issue a press release announcing that it may be doing a particularly good job of helping its students learn.

Oh, the controversy! By citing its unusually high scores on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, UNO was either giving in to satanic temptation or paving the way for totalitarian dictatorship, depending on who you asked. “Shame,” said one anonymous commenter at Inside Higher Ed. “Lies,” said another. “Gamesmanship,” said an official at the State University of New York at Binghamton, lamenting that his faculty’s hard work in developing local assessments would be undone.

Well, that’s easy for him to say. Binghamton is the flagship university in the SUNY system. It can pick and choose from among the best students across New York State and nationwide, most of whom come from relatively well-off backgrounds and enroll full time, living on-campus or nearby. Binghamton’s median SAT scores are high, funding levels generous, and scholarly reputation strong, leading U.S. News & World Report to rank it as the 37th best public university in America — sorry, 34th best, up three from last year, which Binghamton proudly announced on August 22nd. In a press release.

Apparently, it’s perfectly OK to boast about your performance on a measure that’s highly correlated with, and partially based on, how well your students did on a standardized test they took when they were juniors in high school. But a test of how much they learned after enrolling? Gamesmanship!

Read the rest of this column here at Inside Higher Ed.