Why all the course-level assessment?

When students are asked an open-ended question on an exam and they don't know the answer, they tend to write everything they do know that they weren't asked...and they write and write and write. Why do they do that? Probably for one of two reasons: they hope the faculty member will find the right answer in all their ramblings or they will be given extra "points" for their effort. Why do we approach program assessment the same way? I can hear it now, "We don't know what the accreditors want, so we will just give them everything."

This approach always ends up in creating undue work on the part of faculty and, while producing massive amounts of data, produces absolutely no information that can be effectively used to improve the student learning experience. We have lost sight of the fact that we are assessing the "program" not the student. Yes, we gather evidence from students but it is not for the purpose of assessing them--we are already doing that in their courses. It is for the purpose of assessing ourselves. Can we provide evidence that by the end of the academic program students have attained the ability to (fill in the blank)? If we believe that student learning is cumulative over time and that what is learned in one course is applied in another course, built upon in another course, etc., throughout the curriculum, then by the time students are ready to graduate, their learning should be more than the sum of all their courses. Why do we collect data in lower level courses and average them with the data taken in upper level courses and pretend like we know what they mean? Are we really saying that all courses are equal in how they contribute to cumulative learning and that the complexity and depth/breadth at which students are to perform is the same in all courses for any given outcome? Why not only collect "evidence" of student learning in the course where students have a culminating experience related to the outcome. Yes, collecting evidence in a lower-level course would be helpful in understanding student strengths and weaknesses related to any given outcome. This would enable faculty to reinforce and emphasize those concepts where students were weak prior to the culminating experience. However, these data should not be aggregated with the data collected in the culminating experience. Why do you need more than one data point for each student from whom you have collected data?

We need to bring some sanity back into what we are doing or the entire "outcomes assessment" process will collapse under its own weight--as well it should.