A Vicious Spiral of Assessment in Higher Ed (LLM Co-Authored)

The Illusion of Assessment

University assessment systems are out of control. What was once a modest exercise to measure educational outcomes has metastasized into a bloated, expensive, and methodologically bankrupt industry. The costs—both in time and labor—are staggering, while the actual utility of the data these assessments produce is minimal at best, and in many cases, non-existent. Faculty loathe the bureaucratic demands of assessment, which often consume valuable time better spent teaching, mentoring, or conducting research. Worse, assessment perpetuates administrative bloat and diverts resources away from the real mission of higher education: learning.

Administrative Bloat: The High Cost of Assessment

The rise of assessment protocols in universities has fed an ever-growing cadre of administrators, tasked with ensuring that learning outcomes are "measured" and "quantified." These are individuals whose jobs exist solely to collect, analyze, and report on assessment data, yet the very nature of what they are assessing is highly suspect. These artifacts—student essays, projects, exams, presentations, and portfolios—vary wildly in quality, grade weight, and relevance to the purported learning objectives. Despite this diversity, administrators often demand consistency in measurement, as if all artifacts are equal in demonstrating a student's grasp of complex subject matter. This is a fundamental flaw in the assessment system, yet it continues unchecked.

Additionally, the sheer labor required for assessment is staggering. Faculty members spend countless hours identifying suitable "artifacts" for assessment, devising rubrics, filling out forms, and attending endless meetings about how to assess assessment. The administrative costs associated with assessment—including new staff hires and the software platforms required to track and analyze data—are astronomical, diverting funds away from more productive endeavors. Worse still, faculty time is wasted on these processes, at the expense of genuine teaching and student engagement.

Faculty Frustration and the Loss of Academic Autonomy

Faculty discontent with the assessment process is widespread, and for good reason. Professors who are highly trained in their fields of expertise are being asked to participate in bureaucratic exercises that often feel like hollow exercises in compliance. This leads to a loss of academic autonomy, as administrators impose top-down mandates on what should be taught, how it should be taught, and how it should be measured. The presumption that faculty need to be constantly monitored and evaluated through endless cycles of assessment undermines the trust that was once central to the academic profession.

Back in the good old days, universities trusted faculty to teach effectively. Departments were left to define their own educational goals and outcomes without layers of administrative oversight. The system worked. Professors crafted syllabi, taught their courses, and evaluated students based on academic rigor and their own expertise in the subject matter. In contrast, today’s assessment demands faculty to not only produce grades but to also explain, justify, and document those grades in a way that feeds the ever-hungry administrative machine. Professors are not treated as experts in their fields, but as data entry clerks providing information to be fed into a centralized system of questionable value.

The Methodological Farce: Data Without Meaning

Perhaps the greatest sin of the current assessment system is its methodological incoherence. The artifacts being assessed—whether they are essays, exams, or other forms of student work—are so varied in terms of quality, context, and grading weight that any conclusions drawn from them are statistically meaningless. These artifacts are being assessed by a mishmash of individuals: sometimes by the professor herself, sometimes by departmental committees who may have no real expertise in the subject matter, and sometimes by outside evaluators whose main qualification is their familiarity with assessment jargon. The fidelity from artifact to "data" in assessment is abysmally low.

What’s worse, we misuse the term "data" to legitimize the entire process. In the world of assessment, anything that can be quantified is treated as data, no matter how that number was produced or the quality of the information it conveys. If a rubric assigns a numerical value to a student’s performance, that number is treated as valid data—even though rubrics are often highly subjective and context-dependent. This rampant misuse of the term "data" gives the illusion of scientific rigor, when in fact, the process is anything but scientific. In reality, the numbers generated by assessment are little more than artifacts themselves—figures that administrators and accrediting bodies can point to in order to claim that learning is happening, even when the underlying "data" is highly suspect.

Conflicts of Interest and the Corruption of Data

Another insidious aspect of assessment is the clear conflict of interest embedded in the system. Departments conducting their own assessments are incentivized to produce positive results. After all, no department wants to report that it is failing to meet its learning objectives or target goals, as doing so could jeopardize funding, faculty lines, or even the department's existence. This pressure to "hit the target" means that assessment data is often warped, whether consciously or unconsciously, to ensure that the department looks good on paper.

Some learning outcomes themselves are nothing more than performance art, created not to genuinely improve teaching and learning but to appease administrators, parents, and accrediting bodies. The entire process is more about optics than substance. Departments perform the assessment rituals because they have to, not because they believe it will lead to better educational outcomes. This makes the entire system corrupt at its core—a charade designed to perpetuate administrative control and justify the existence of ever-expanding layers of bureaucracy.

The Threat of AI: A New Challenge to Valid Assessment

In the age of Artificial Intelligence, the validity of many assessments has been further eroded. Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are now capable of producing essays, projects, and even complex research papers that are indistinguishable from student work. This introduces a new layer of uncertainty into the assessment process. If a student submits a paper written with the aid of AI, is that paper really measuring the student’s learning? Or is it measuring the effectiveness of the AI tool?

Assessments that are not conducted in-class, under controlled conditions, are now highly vulnerable to AI interference. Without strict protocols to ensure the integrity of assessments, we run the risk of evaluating AI-generated artifacts instead of genuine student work. Yet the current assessment regimes seem blissfully unaware of this new threat, continuing to rely on the same flawed processes that were already problematic before AI entered the picture.

Conclusion: A Mass Hallucination

The university assessment industry has spiraled out of control, consuming vast amounts of time, money, and energy, while producing little in the way of meaningful data. It is a mass hallucination, one that everyone has bought into despite its clear flaws. Faculty are frustrated, students are overburdened, and the data generated by assessment processes is often useless. If accrediting bodies genuinely cared about educational quality, they would drastically minimize the role of assessment and trust faculty to do what they have always done best—teach. Instead, we are stuck in a system that prioritizes bureaucratic oversight over genuine learning. The cottage industry of assessment needs to be dismantled, before it does any further damage to higher education.

In the least, accrediting bodies should mandate stricter protocols to ensure that assessments are valid, especially in the face of AI. But ideally, we would return to a time when faculty were trusted to educate without the constant surveillance of a bloated, corrupt, and methodologically unsound system. It’s time to reclaim higher education from the tyranny of assessment.