The CLA was first launched in 2000 by the Council for Aid to Education, a national nonprofit organization based in New York City. Rather than testing for specific content knowledge gained in particular courses or majors, the intent was to assess “the collective and cumulative result of what takes place or does not take place over the four to six years of undergraduate education in and out of the classroom. Of the entire test, the most well-developed and sophisticated part is its performance task component, in which students are given ninety minutes to respond to a writing prompt that is associated with a set of background documents. The testing materials, including the documents, are accessed through a computer. CAE has published several examples of representative performance tasks, one of which is described below : CAE also publishes its scoring rubric. The design of both the prompts and the criteria for evaluation demonstrates the CLA's focus on complex, holistic, real-world problem-solving as a measurement of high level learning. As a result, the argument goes, institutions that attempt to “teach to the test” will be schools that teach students “to think critically, reason analytically, solve problems, and communicate clearly."
Criticisms
Again according to Academically Adrift, there are four primary criticisms of the CLA. Two criticisms relate to the validity of the instrument:
By focusing on general skills rather than domain knowledge and specialization, the instrument may lack the construct validity to measure the specialized knowledge that students go to college to obtain.
The CLA lacks instrumental validity to measure individual performance. This concern, however, may have been partially addressed by a 2009 test validity study organized by the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education. The results showed that while these tests should not be used as a basis to make institutional decisions about students as individuals, when aggregated in larger samples they can provide reliable estimates of institutional or group-level differences in performance on these tasks.
Two other criticisms relate to the normative implications of the CLA:
An aversion to standardized testing in general and a belief that there is accountability in higher education due to market forces. That is, if students were not gaining something through education then they would not be paying for it. On this view, the CLA is a waste of time and money.
The use of the test implies that the value-added from higher education can be measured. Individuals who oppose the idea that learning consists of acquiring specific knowledge or mental constructs, or is intended to improve performance on some measure, may therefore oppose the measurement of learning.
