William Plank, Contributing Editor
Foreign Lang. & Lit.
Eastern Montana College
Several decades ago in the mental institutions of the state of Minnesota, professional caretakers, flushed with the knowledge of Freud and Krafft-Ebbing and surrounded in their professional lives by the mentally bizarre, put together an examination called the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, the infamous MMPI. This test was written to measure the degree of psychiatric misery of institutionalized patients. It did not measure whether they were normal or sane, but only how crazy they were. Anybody who took the test was ipso facto crazy and the test would show you just how crazy. As Erving Goffman wrote in Asylums, the fact that you were in an institution proved that you were crazy. As long as you maintained that you were sane, it was the proof that you were crazy. Only when you admitted that you were crazy was there any hope for your sanity.
Our fellow-travelers in academia, the pedagogues, picked up on the MMPI and began to give it to people whose aberrations had not yet been identified and who had so far escaped the total institution--i.e., students. A couple of decades ago we were giving the MMPI at Eastern Montana College to students who were going into teaching. Somebody finally thought better of it and discontinued the practice, but not before we had ferreted out several cases of psychic rot, existential malaise, spiritual disarray, and incipient danger to the nation's little children. In the case of two young fellows, it was even determined that they were possessed by a demon and in need of exorcism. The lesson to be learned from this story is that measuring instruments are never innocent--they are based on preconceived ideas of what is good for the state and the human race.
Our president, the one who likes to talk about "deep doo-doo," called a meeting in which a bunch of politicians invented "America 2000," a laudable effort to make the nation's schools superior by the end of the century as long as it didn't cost much. Like the Governor's Commission for Education in the '90s and Beyond, they conveniently gave themselves about a decade to study the problem. One of the magical techniques to come out of this is "values assessment," in which children's values are evaluated in order that we may know whether they are at risk or not and identify them as such. This values assessment is a model for inner-city schools where pregnancy, desperation, and poverty are the norm and murder is not uncommon. This model will now be applied to target schools all over the nation, even to the secondary schools I know the most about, Billings Senior and Billings West, which regularly send their graduating seniors to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Cal Tech, Cornell, and any other prestigious university you can name. I wonder if the students in Billings West High School's four sections of enriched physics will be able to make it without having had their values assessed or whether they are patted down for weapons when they come into class.
Now, in several parts of the country there is a program afloat called "exit assessments" for college students, an idea which has fascinated administrations without enough money to staff and maintain programs being offered at present. In Montana, the Governor's Commission for the '90s recommended that the Montana University System do this, even though it will cost several million dollars. Briefly, this means that somebody would figure out what graduating students should know and then give them a test to see if they know it. A lot of professors have been going along for years thinking that they had been doing just that and taking satisfaction in the proclamation of the politicians that we have the best higher education system in the world.
Are the Ivy League universities going to give exit assessments? No. Why not? Well, there are several reasons. (1) They identify, hire and pay the best and most productive professors in the world and supply them with the latest in books and lab equipment and so they figure that those profs are going to do a good job. (2) They look around at the SAT and ACT scores in the high schools all over the USA and they just offer massive scholarships to the cream of the crop. So the cream of the crop packs up its suitcases and their daddies and mommies drive them back east and drop them off with a catch in the throat and a tear or two in the eye. That's why the median SAT score is 1400 at Harvard, 1355 at Princeton, 1365 at Yale, 1345 at Stanford, 1405 at Cal Tech, 1370 at MIT, 1320 at Johns Hopkins. At MSU it is 980 and at UM it is 946. I don't know what it is at the other Montana institutions. I don't want to talk about it.
Why don't the Ivy Leagues give "exit assessments?" They don't have to. They know that "exit assessments" are a sign of lack of confidence in professors and students, in the administration, in the public schools, and that they have better things to do. They know that "exit assessments" are a stigma better left to those institutions which service low income groups, lower achieving groups, parents and students with lower ambitions, lower SAT scores, shorter attention spans, a clientele from the lower social classes. The "exit assessment" is a low-class, class-oriented, academically trashy, economically impoverished, and administratively hysterical boondoggle created by monolingual pedagogues, consultants, and non-academics who have fled the classroom in terror and who have never published an article in one of the standard disciplines such as history, literature, philosophy, physics, chemistry, mathematics, political science, and biology or who have never had a painting or sculpture in an exhibition or written or performed a musical composition in public. They expect, with an examination bought from a testing company and costing $100 per student for about 27,000 students ($2,700,000), to compensate for failure to support properly the university system. No professor with any sympathy for the student and the taxpayer and with any pride in the dignity of his product and his discipline will have anything to do with it.