Pretty much all of us who were around when the CPE was introduced said the same thing “we already DO assess student learning, and we signify the results of the assessment quite clearly. We call the signifiers ‘grades.’ And with enough grades we give another signifier called a ‘diploma.’ This test is redundant and is not going to show us anything we don’t already know.”
Ten years later, surprise! Students who are already doing well in terms of GPA and curriculum requirements do just fine on the CPE, and students who are not doing well in terms of GPA also do not do well on the CPE.
There was an idea that FACULTY are somehow not competent to be accurate, objective, and constructive assessors of student learning. There was an idea that we needed an outside one-shot test to do that complicated professional-level work, because we weren’t to be trusted to do it ourselves.
There really wasn’t ever any validity to that idea (and I’m not going to speculate about what motivated that idea). We DO assess student learning at CUNY, and we do it very accurately and carefully. And faculty are the best ones to do that assessment.
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