Swirl and Assessment

In a recent discussion about a more forgiving residency requirement, someone raised a question I had a hard time answering:

If a student transfers in three-quarters of their degree credits from other places, whose outcomes are being assessed?

That may sound extreme or hypothetical, but it’s a real issue.

Outside of the elite institutions that dominate the discourse, it’s common for students to “swirl” between or among institutions. These are students who picked up some credits here and some there, often with breaks for life happening and/or financial issues. They often show up at community colleges in hopes of taking a few more classes to patch together an actual degree.

As dual enrollment has become more common, I foresee scenarios like these becoming more common. A student takes, say, 24 credits from one or more providers while in high school, then spends a semester or two “away” at college, assembling some more credits. Life happens, the student spends some time working, then shows up at the community college hoping to put together a degree to improve their employment prospects and/or salary.

From a community service perspective, this is a crucial role, and one that community colleges are uniquely well placed to serve. Low tuition, geographic convenience and open-door admissions policies make them particularly welcoming to students like that.

But it raises a tricky question from an assessment perspective. The point of assessment is to show that, upon completion, students are capable of doing what the program or college claims they’ll be able to do. A relatively low residency requirement—that is, requiring a relatively low percentage of a degree to be taken at the college awarding the degree—is a boon to students who have been places, but it stands in tension with the goals of outcomes assessment.

I’ve seen residency requirements as low as 25 percent, which equates to 15 credits of a 60-credit degree. The argument for that is relatively straightforward from a student perspective. If a student has compiled, say, 48 credits over the years, requiring them to take at least another 30 to finish a 60-credit degree seems unnecessarily burdensome. It adds cost and time and sometimes forces students to retake classes they’ve already passed. It makes outcomes assessment somewhat cleaner, but it feels a bit like the tail wagging the dog. Outcomes assessment exists for students, rather than the other way around. Forcing extra cost on students in the name of cleaner data misses the point of that data.

To be fair, assessment comes in a few flavors. Course-based assessment shouldn’t be affected by transfer, but program- and institution-level assessments can be. The point of assessing, say, gen ed outcomes is to ensure that students are able to demonstrate the skills conveyed in gen ed classes and to motivate improvement in course delivery over time. But if students transfer in all of their gen eds and are found wanting, that doesn’t tell the local English department anything useful. If someone transfers from Compass Direction State with their composition requirements covered, yet we find that they struggle with writing, what, exactly, are we supposed to do with that information? Reteaching all of the gen ed outcomes in the capstone courses of every major isn’t realistic, nor would it be fair to the students who already got what they needed at the introductory level and are looking, rightly, for more.

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen an elegant resolution to this tension? If so, I’d love to hear about it! As always, I’m at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.