Not a day passes without an invitation to assess some service, usually by filling out a form, with scales from 1 to 5 to indicate my level of satisfaction with various aspects of my ‘experience.’ If I call my bank, my insurance company or any of the other firms with which I do business I am assured that calls are monitored and recorded ‘for quality of service,’ and asked to take surveys assessing call center workers’ performance.
I once asked that my call not be monitored to spare the call center worker. But the procedure for opting out was so cumbersome that I backed down. It is, practically speaking, impossible to opt out of the Culture of Assessment.
In the past, only drudge workers were supervised and assessed. It was assumed that professionals could be trusted to do their jobs without close supervision and prodding. Nowadays, everyone is assessed: in fact, everyone assesses everyone.
The assessment of all against all has significant human costs: we are always under surveillance and are constantly evaluated, endlessly scoring points or racking up demerits. Even if, as consumers, we benefit from service by workers who are efficient and deferential in order to keep their scores up—and keep their jobs—as employees we ourselves are under the gun.
But human misery isn’t the only cost of assessment. The process itself—the business of developing forms, tests and other ‘instruments’ for assessment, and of processing data, is time-consuming and does not contribute directly to production. The assessment system needs administrators to collect, process, and analyze assessment data, and managers to assess assessments, punish underachievers, and squeeze increased ‘productivity’ out of workers. These überassessors are paid much more highly than other workers, though they don’t contribute directly to the production of goods or services. And their ranks are growing.
In higher education, my business, while the ratio of faculty to students has remained unchanged over the past 20 years, the ratio of administrators to faculty has tripled. Universities are top-heavy with highly paid administrators. And accrediting agencies employ cadres of assessors who visit universities to assess their programs and produce reports, which are processed by university administrators.
All this is expensive, but Americans believe in industrial discipline to promote productivity and assume the cost is worth it.
Assessment probably does increase individual productivity. In a world without assessment assembly lines would slow down or disappear and academics would write far fewer articles solely in order to get vita entries. But overall we would be more productive if assessment ended—if assessors were pensioned off and employees used the time they now spend writing self-evaluations of their job performance, doing their jobs.
Nevertheless, because everyone hates assessment, we will keep doing it: we have faith that where there is pain, there must be gain. So even if we never see any improvement we will keep assessing. We will assess until assessment burns itself out in a recursive apocalypse: when everyone is an administrator or manager, and the only work left to assess is assessment itself.
H.E. Barber
H.E. Baber is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Diego. An exdurantist, her primary philosophical interest is in puzzles concerning the identities of persons and other ordinary objects—and the identity of extraordinary objects. The Trinity: A Philosophical Investigation, her most recent book, will be in print at the end of May.
Funny. I take your points. Yet that culture came out of an education movement which still finds it difficult to comprehend who is trying hard enough to ensure that our young people get the best education possible. How do we know if teachers are applying maximum effort? How do we know if standards in Mississippi are the same as in Maryland? Our beliefs need justification.
But yes, there is an assessment genie that has gotten out of the lamp and has worked itself into our computer systems and belief systems. I think this genie is needed on the whole, but we need to wish for the right things….and for there to be limits. This is where I think discussion needs to continue.
In my view, there is a handy guide available for assessing the rationality of a person of reason, whether they are academics or amateur pundits such as myself.
Before we can make any assessment we have to establish some criteria which we are measuring. So when evaluating a person of reason our assessment will depend heavily what we think the purpose of reason is. Many such definitions can be offered and reasonably debated.
For the purposes of this comment, I will define reason as the application of disciplined thought to the advancement of human welfare. I won’t claim that this is the only possible definition, only that it is a definition that resonates with me.
From that definition, a person of reason can be measured by their relationship with nuclear weapons.
To illustrate, we might consider this example. Imagine that I show up to your house for the philosophy club meeting with a hair trigger loaded gun in my mouth. In such a case, what would be the most rational topic for the philosophy club to address?
Aren’t nuclear weapons a loaded gun in the mouth of our entire culture?
This tends to be a very unpopular yardstick to apply because few of us come out looking very good by such a measurement. Across the culture nuclear weapons are typically seen to be one of a million issues, and thus are usually given a tiny fragment of our attention. Is this rational? Not in my view.
I’m not too happy with what this measurement reveals about myself either, as I’ve yet to really arrive at a constructive plan of my own for how I can contribute to this issue other than making everyone around me uncomfortable, which seems a rather meager contribution.
You open your front door. And there I am. With the loaded gun in my mouth.
So, what shall we discuss at tonight’s philosophy club meeting?
Is there any empirical evidence that assessment as currently practiced has improved academic performance? Once there were no course evaluations and, until more recently, no assessment of students other than via grades for classwork. Is there any empirical evidence that the machinery of assessment has improved ‘learning outcomes’–other than those tailored to produce results mandated by assessors because of their assessability?