So imagine your courageous guest blogger enconsed in his attic office, leafing through final seminar papers–anonymized, of course–and assessing them.  I should say, rather, that I am assessing said papers in order to help my department self-assess the job we do.  In order to do that, we must assess the students’ work.

Assessment, for you non-academics out there, is a quite the buzzword these days. It’s not just in the No Child Left Behind spheres of elementary and secondary education; no, it has spread to undergraduate and graduate college education.

Gerald Graff, president of the Modern Language Association, wrote an article in the MLA Newsletter called “Assessment Changes Everything” that addresses  how and what academics should do with assessment tools, learning outcomes, all that jazz.  (A version of that piece appears on Inside Higher Ed.)

Assessment–by which I mean statistics, proof-of-concepts, number-crunching, multi-phase studies–has become the way teachers of all stripes prove their worth and success, and that is certainly no exception in the humanities. “We make a huge mistake if we don’t try to articulate more publicly what it is we value in intellectual work,” Graff quotes University of Pittsburgh professor David Bartholomae. “We do this routinely for our students — so it should not be difficult to find the language we need to speak to parents and legislators.”

Still, as Graff says, “excellent teaching in itself doesn’t guarantee an excellent education.” A student might not be ready for that literary theory course, or another has taken advanced poetry too late in his or her academic career to really give it a chance. Assessment tools, those rubrics and checklists and tests we administer and take, at least at this point, don’t take too many of those variables and others into account.

I don’t have the answers, but when assessing students as well as myself, the one word I try to remember, one that has also entered the cultural zeitgeist lately, is this: empathy. I have yet to see empathy factor into, say, grammar skills. But it does and it should.  President Obama was taken to task by many a pundit for using that quality as a barometer for his selection of Sonia Sotomayor for as Supreme Court justice. I fall on the empathy side of assessment.

Anyway, back to assessing.