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Free GREs as assessment may not be bargain, FSEC hears
By MARY COCHRANE
Contributing Editor
Offering free Graduate Record Exams (GRE) to a sample group of future undergraduates as part of UB's general education assessment plan may actually be harmful to some of the students, according to some members of the Faculty Senate Executive Committee.
Carol L. Tutzauer, director for assessment, and Peter S. Gold, associate dean for general education, College of Arts and Sciences, discussed the plan for strengthened campus-based assessment for a second time at yesterday's FSEC meeting. Their proposal—which is required by the SUNY board of trustees—would include offering the test to a 20 percent sample of undergraduates during their junior year, paid for by SUNY at the cost of about $110 per exam.
Student motivation to do well on the test was one of the primary issues discussed during the meeting. Some faculty senators, as well as several representatives from the undergraduate Student Association, objected to administering the test to students who may not be planning to attend graduate school and thus may not do their best work on it.
Tutzauer reminded the group that all students who take the GRE would be doing so voluntarily and that her team would work to make clear to them the reporting policies of their scores. Under the regulations of the Educational Testing Service, which administers the exam, scores are good for five years after a test is taken, and are reported along with any future scores should a student elect to take the exam more than once.
But a student who later decides to apply to graduate school may have earned an average or below-average score when they first took the test at UB, some faculty senators said.
"I'm worried about the reporting function," H. Austin Booth, director of collections, Arts and Sciences Libraries, said. "This score is going to get reported if you decide you're going to go to graduate school, even though you really didn't think you were going to and you sort of just walked in and took it because you thought you had to or because you thought it wouldn't matter."
Tutzauer acknowledged that she has been "looking at lots of methods for motivating students to perform well."
"It may come to something where we use a notation on the student's transcript, not of the student's score but that they took the GRE and successfully completed it and showed competency in the various areas. That's one way to encourage students to take it seriously, for example," Tutzauer said.
But Samuel D. Schack, chair of the Department of Mathematics, objected to such an inducement, saying it would not be necessary to coerce students to take the exam seriously.
"Students are used to being buffeted in all sorts of ways. But the idea that we would randomly select them and then threaten them strikes me as not the kind of thing I want my university to do," Schack said. "I think we can randomly select them, we can offer them inducements to do this seriously, we can recognize that we've selected a test that a vast majority of them will choose to take seriously for their own reasons and that's why we selected it. But aside from that, we're going to have to live with the fact that some students may just show up drunk and early, and hit Box A on every single question. And that's life."
Leslie Meister, student affairs director for SA, asked "why not get the scores of students already taking the GRE anyway? Who are going to grad school?" Tutzauer noted, however, that "only those who are already applying for graduate programs are currently taking exam on their own," and that others, especially those with lower grade-point averages, would be cut out of such a sampling.
Some faculty members suggested that Tutzauer request ETS to consider exempting UB's GRE test-takers from official scoring. Others suggested, as had been done in last week's meeting, that students take practice runs of the GRE, and that the assessment team gather their data from students' work on the practice tests only.
"If you base the reporting to the state on a practice GRE, it will avoid potential ethical problems," Powhatan J. Wooldridge, associate research professor of nursing, said. "Many of the problems that we're facing go away if we don't have to report these results in any way that might potentially harm the student. Even if you argue that they knew what they were doing going in, it makes me uncomfortable to think that any student might be harmed potentially by having participated in this study."
Dela Yador, SA president, and Vigar Hussain, senate chair of SA, added their voices to those asking the assessment team to reconsider administering an official test with permanent scores.
They and several faculty members said that students' performing well on the GRE isn't necessarily a measure of how UB has contributed to their learning.
"At the end of the day, we don't know who's going to graduate school. But we do know students are here for a college education and that's all we're 100 percent sure of," Yador said. "Respectfully, it almost seems as if we're hesitant to rely on our teaching as a fair assessment of what the students learn. It's not a fair measure if the student is willing to do well on the GRE and really put the effort in there."
Sonia Kang, SA vice president, also raised the question of how long SUNY would be willing to pay for free GREs. Tutzauer replied that the guidelines state that "reasonable costs will be paid." She added that using a standardized test is "far cheaper" than other assessment options.
In response to further questions of student performance on a test they aren't planning to use in their careers, Tutzauer said students taking the GRE with no intention of going to graduate school would probably do as well as if they took it later in their lives.
"They probably won't perform on it any better than they do at the end of their (college) career than they do when they're out for a while," she said.
Debra A. Street, assistant professor of sociology, disagreed, saying she would be "very reluctant to encourage juniors to take the GRE for our evaluation purposes if they didn't feel ready and they wanted to go to graduate school."
William H. Baumer, professor of philosophy, said that the GRE might serve students with lower grade-point averages, whether or not they later attend graduate school.
"For a student in the lower GPA group, a good GRE score could be a nice balance for whatever that student wants to do at some future date, including employment as well as graduate school. And that is a plus that we might point out to them as we ask them to take it. I think it offsets the concerns that have been addressed," Baumer said.
Henry J. Durand, director of the Center for Academic Development Services, suggested senators "think about a different sampling strategy."
"These (assessments) are supposed to represent what the University at Buffalo has added to these students' abilities," Durand said. "Originally the Faculty Senate was behind added value evaluation. It was an evaluation of the university, not the student. The best of all worlds would be if we could get ETS to say that this will not be one of those tests that has to be recorded. That way, it seems to me everybody wins. The students get their practice, the university gets their data, the students can match it to other tests that they want to match it to. I think that's what we want to drive for."