Can New Assessment Tools Help Graduates Acquire The Right Job Skills?

The financial crisis of 2007-2008 and its consequences have revealed that there is a disparity in the skills that employers are looking for and the skills that most college graduates develop. With further technological advancements, it is expected that this problem would become more severe.

Institutes need to be more efficient and effective

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This is not the time for presidents and trustees of universities for feel confident and complacent. According to Monica Herk,vice president for education research at the Committee for Economic Development, all institutes of higher education need to put more emphasis on certifying expertise in specific skills which businesses demand, instead of requiring learners to simply attend a certain number of classes. In a recent post, Herk writes, “America’s postsecondary institutions need to simultaneously become more effective and more efficient. That is, they need to educate more students to a higher level of skills and knowledge, while doing so at a lower cost per student. Of course, achieving that solution is a bit more challenging. Fortunately digital innovations – in the form of computers, communications, and “big data” - may be opening the door to a disruptive transformation of the postsecondary sector through a shift to competency-based education.”

Unbundling courses

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This might eventually result in an unbundling of academic courses and certifications. According to her, if we wish to make this new and potentially cost-effective academic system work, then we will have to focus on the availability and extensive use of different kinds of assessments which will help to certify that graduates have specific skills and competencies. This does not necessarily be implement in all standardized tests. Herk adds “It is likely that there would need to be more than one assessment, geared to the variety of skills different jobs require. Nor would all of these assessments necessarily be multiple-choice, bubble-in-the-answer tests. The assessment industry has advanced in its ability to assess a broader variety of skills “authentically,” including through asking respondents to react to complicated scenarios online.”

Need for better assessment tools

She believes that “the key is to develop assessments that are reasonable predictors of future job performance. These assessments need not be perfect, they just have to provide a better “signal” than what we have now. But it’s hard to imagine a noisier signal than our current system of relying on what degree students have and where they received it.”

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The Collegiate Learning Assessment is one of the most effective tools that is currently being used by more than 700 schools. The assessment tries to measure how much students in college have actually learned since starting their freshman year till the time in their senior year. However, there is still a lot of scope in the market for utilising other types of specific assessments.

A final word

The development of specialised assessment tools should be considered as a high research priority in both academic and business. After certain assessments have been approved by employers as dependable indicators of competencies and future performance, the academic sphere should finally be disrupted. This will completely transform education and make it more unbundled, more affordable and effective.

What do you think? Share you opinions about unbundling of higher education by commenting below.

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