This is a sample post included at launch to demonstrate the format. It is not representative of what I intend to publish here.
Business schools lose hundreds of faculty hours per accreditation cycle to a confusion that takes one paragraph to resolve.
Assessment asks how a student performed. Assurance of learning asks whether the program produced the learning it claims to produce. The subject of the first sentence is a student. The subject of the second is a curriculum. Accreditors ask the second question, and most schools answer the first at considerable expense.
The symptom is recognizable. A committee collects every rubric from every section, aggregates grades into a report of impressive length, and presents it as evidence of program quality. The reviewer reads it and asks what the program changed as a result. There is no answer, because grades were never capable of producing one. Grades measure students against a standard. They cannot tell you whether the standard was the right one, whether the curriculum delivered it, or whether a revision three years ago helped.
A working assurance of learning process is smaller than the one most schools run. It measures a handful of program-level outcomes on a defined cycle, using instruments built for that purpose, and it documents what the faculty changed after reading the results. The closing of the loop is the deliverable. Everything else is collection.
The reason the confusion persists is that the expensive version feels more rigorous. Volume reads as diligence. It is not, and reviewers have stopped treating it that way.