While Michigan lawmakers continue to talk about The Common Core and high school exit exams that test “college and career readiness” education reformers are moving on to higher education in their quest to fundamentally transform education in the United Sates. From the Wall Street Journal,
Next spring, seniors at about 200 U.S. colleges will take a new test that could prove more important to their fu ture than final exams: an SAT-like assessment that aims to cut through grade-point averages and judge students’ real value to employers.
A new test for college seniors that aims to be the SAT for prospective employers is the latest blow to the monopoly long-held by colleges and universities on what it means to be well-educated. Doug Belkin and Michael Poliakoff, Alumni V.P. of Policy, join Lunch Break.
The test, called the Collegiate Learning Assessment, “provides an objective, benchmarked report card for critical thinking skills,” said David Pate, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at St. John Fisher College, a small liberal-arts school near Rochester, N.Y. “The students will be able to use it to go out and market themselves.
The test is part of a movement to find new ways to assess the skills of graduates. Employers say grades can be misleading and that they have grown skeptical of college credentials.
Like all tests, it will start out as “voluntary” but when Obama took over the student-loan industry it was obvious where we were headed, at least to me anyway. Federal incentives were used to get states to adopt common core, they’ll use federal incentives and loan approval to make sure higher education “volunteers” to implement the post-college exit exam. All leading toward a National Career Readiness Certificate.
ACT, the nonprofit that administers the college-admission exam of the same name, has a National Career Readiness Certificate, which measures skills such as synthesizing and applying information presented graphically.
The P-20 seamless pathway from cradle to career is moving right along.