Program Assessments and National Exams: Finding Common Ground.

Institutions of higher education are expected to assess the effectiveness of their programs to provide validation to stakeholders such as state legislators, accrediting boards, alumni, and parents that they are upholding and meeting their expected standards in teaching. This is often accomplished with the use of outcomes assessments, which have many different formats. While student learning is important to higher education and their respective stakeholders, the quality of education is also important to the professions with whom students will be seeking employment. Employers strive to hire college graduates that have acquired a base knowledge within their chosen career path to allow them to be a productive employee and team player within a relatively short time after being hired. To this end, professionals in many fields look to national exams as a means to provide a validation of a potential employee's preparation to enter the work place. National exams are prepared using the “state of the practice” and are developed using learning or performance objectives, especially in the case of the fundamental portion of these exams. Fundamentals exams are generally taken by students during their senior year and if passed provide the student with their “in training” title. The performance objectives used to develop the fundamental exams could also be used to create a baseline for outcomes assessments within university programs thereby providing a more definite link or common ground between academia and professional practice. This paper will specifically consider the example of soil science programs and the use of performance objectives but will also consider the processes used by the geology and engineering professions.