Accountability Moves to the Forefront in the Higher Education Landscape. Will You Be Prepared to Secure and Maintain Your Accreditation?

The National Commission on Accountability in Higher Education recently released its long anticipated report, Accountability for Better Results: A National Imperative for Higher Education, where the Commission called on the government and Institutes of Higher Education (IHE) to collect more data on students in an effort to improve academic quality and performance.

Meanwhile, accrediting agencies have recently expanded their roles in an effort to go beyond simple accreditation. Today’s accrediting bodies are contributing to institutional improvement by helping establish learning goals and assessing institutional performance and capacity against established standards. As a result, improvement in higher education will come as the result of rigorous measurement of student progress and achievement.

As accreditation moves to the forefront of your thinking, assessments should be a primary resource for measuring student learning outcomes and achievement.

The 2006 edition of Eduventures’ Higher Education Survey on Leadership, Innovation, and Technology, a report capturing responses from more than 450 presidents, chief academic officers and chief financial officers from U.S.-based higher education institutions, concludes that two of the top-five strategic objectives of institutions are to improve student learning outcomes and advance the use of data for strategic decisions.

Standardized outcomes assessments are valuable tools that allow colleges and universities to document institutional effectiveness, measure student achievement, and demonstrate program improvement over time. Colleges and universities will need to collect and analyze data on student outcomes and program performance in order to secure and maintain their accreditation. That’s where ETS can help.

With over 60 years of experience providing higher education institutions with valid, reliable, research-based assessments to advance the quality of higher education, ETS has provided colleges and universities with the data accreditation agencies require, including identifying strengths and weaknesses in curricula, charting academic progress, and documenting success.

The ETS Suite of Learning Outcomes Assessments includes tests specifically designed to measure knowledge and skills in general education, program-specific learning and information and communication technology.