Self-assessment by American universities

State universities and colleges have come up with a plan to publish essential information on their web sites.

The National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities are , according to the Wall Street Journal,

" designing a template for college Web sites that, for those that opt to use it, shows in standard format: (1) details about admission rates, costs and graduation rates to make comparisons simple; (2) results from surveys of students designed to measure satisfaction and engagement, and (3) results of tests given to a representative sample of students to gauge not how smart they were when they arrived, but how much they learned about writing, analysis and problem-solving between freshman and senior years.

The last one is the biggie. Participating schools will use one of three tests to gauge the performance of students with similar entering SAT scores at tasks that any college grad ought to be able to handle. One test, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, gives students some circumstance and a variety of information about it, and asks for short essays (no multiple choice) on solving a problem or analyzing a scenario. Under the state schools' proposed grading scale, 70% of the schools will report that students did "as expected," given their SATs. An additional 15% will report they did better or much better than expected, and 15% will report students did worse or much worse than expected."

This seems like a good idea. It could even go some way towards making commercial rankings redundant.