From President Robert Wild, S.J.

Spearheaded by the Department of Education, an effort is now afoot to institute national uniform testing standards to evaluate the effectiveness of universities in educating students.

Recently, a reporter from a local newspaper asked for my opinion on the proposed standardized test and I told her that I thought the idea was ridiculous. The whole world comes to the United States for a university education and it is hardly because we have a reputation for running poor colleges.

Don’t get me wrong — I definitely believe in accountability. But while no single test can tell us whether we are doing right by our students, their parents, our alumni and the wider human family we are striving to serve, there exist already a multiplicity of evaluative tools to which we can and should pay attention.

Among the many independent evaluations we undergo as a university, perhaps the most important is the accreditation review performed by the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. A couple of years ago, we successfully completed our latest review. At that time the association recommended that we strengthen our system of assessment, and this we are doing. When finalized, our assessment procedures should help us to discern not only how effective we have been carrying out our academic enterprise but also where improvements can and should be made.

In our ceaseless quest for greater excellence, we also keep a vigilant eye on various other measures of our performance, including most importantly surveys and reviews of our graduates’ satisfaction with their Marquette experience. We benchmark our efforts here against those of institutions whose company we aspire to keep and against the higher standards to which we hold ourselves.

Concrete data on specific outcomes is also telling. It says something, for instance, that more than 90 percent of graduating seniors report that they would recommend Marquette to others and that all students, freshmen to seniors, in responding to the Noel Levitz Student Satisfaction Survey, gave Marquette high marks when asked if they would choose Marquette again.

We also track the rankings done by various publications either of specific academic programs or of the university taken as a whole. Recently, for example, we were gratified to learn that our College of Business Administration undergraduate program was included in BusinessWeek’s list of the top 50 such business programs in the nation. These rankings, imperfect though they may be, nonetheless help to give us a sense of where we are perceived to stand in the universe of higher education and what might be needed to improve yet further.

Recently as a part of a review by the U.S. bishops of how the various Catholic universities are fulfilling the expectations of the church as expressed in John Paul II’s document “Ex Corde Ecclesiae,” I had a lengthy and quite helpful conversation with Milwaukee Archbishop Timothy Dolan about how Marquette is doing in this regard. He was quite affirming of our efforts as was the current Superior General of the Jesuits, Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, with whom I shared the same report that we had done on this topic, “Assessing the Catholic Identity of Marquette University,” that I had sent to Archbishop Dolan. As I have noted before, our Catholic and Jesuit identity cannot simply be a matter of inspired rhetoric but needs to be for our students and their families a promise actually fulfilled.

My overall conclusion: Aside from the one-size-fits-all problem with a single national test to assess all colleges and universities, such an evaluative instrument would certainly prove quite inadequate to assess properly our success in delivering the core values of our mission. How do you measure a transformation of the mind and the heart, a discovery of one’s life calling? If we say that our specific mission and institutional character are central to our whole educational enterprise, how could such a one-shot test hope to evaluate adequately the quality of our institutional efforts?