Standardized/Nationally-Normed Exams

For almost a decade, we used the Academic Profile Exam from ETS in order to evaluate skills and content typically associated with general education programs. We tested all incoming freshmen and outgoing seniors. We stopped giving the exam a few years ago because we were not learning anything new from the data and because we were concerned about students' apathy toward the exam. We are now trying the more recent version of the Academic Profile (now called MAPP) and we are experimenting with testing samples of the student population as well as various ways of administering the exam so that students will take it more seriously (e.g., in the context of a class). We still believe that there are significant benefits of using standardized exams, including the ability to compare our students to those at other similar institutions. Also, we have used the results of standardized tests to document improvements in our students' abilities.