Today at Inside Higher Education, there is a must-read essay about the impact that demands for ever-greater assessment has on faculty workload. Written by a member of the faculty at a large state university, the essay notes that faculty members, like other earthlings, have only 24 hours per day, many of which are taken up with crucial activities like research, teaching, and responding to student work. If new assessment tasks are to be added to faculty duties (as they routinely are, at least at universities like my own), it suggests that the administrators or committees adding them think faculty have infinite stores of time and energy.
They don't!
Thus, the essay argues, those looking for additional assessment need to make reality-based plans:
From now on, all plans for assessment should come with plans for who is going to do the labor, where the labor time is going to come from, and, if need be, who will pay for it. This side of any assessment plan should be as detailed as the requirements for assessing itself, including an estimate of the added number of hours required for the assessment, as the IRS estimates the time to do our taxes.
I'm guessing, if new assessment mandates took account of the real costs, there might be more demand on the front end to assess whether the assessment was worth the projected costs.
It's a good essay. Click over and read the whole thing.
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I'm all for no-tikee-no-washee. However, I am not clear what kind of assessment we are talking about, even though assessment was a buzzword even back in the 90's. A program review every five years was usual for many years. For reasons I don't recall, I had to crank out two of them the first six weeks I was chair. I also had to deal with converting from quarters to semesters and restructuring the university to make five separate schools into a College of Arts and Sciences under a new outside Dean. I have a little bit of insight as to how President Obama must feel.