One of the more difficult problems to unravel in the world of higher education is the fact that universities are responsible both for delivering teaching and judging whether or not a student has learned enough to get a degree. To most reasonable minds, this is a conflict of interest. Indeed, this is the conflict that makes universities unreformable: as long as universities have a monopoly on judging their own quality, no one external to the system (students, governments) can make realistic comparisons between institutions, or can push for improvements.
Yet, it hasn’t always been this way. Even in living memory, the University of London was, to a large extent, an examination body. Higher education institutions all over Africa were simply “colleges” that taught at the higher education level; to get a degree, students would still have to sit exams set by the University of London. One body teaches, one body examines.
Historically, Canadian universities did a lot of this kind of thing. The University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria both started as “affiliates” of McGill, before they got degree-granting status of their own – students would learn at one institution, and then get a degree from another. Ditto Brandon with McMaster. Similarly, the University of Manitoba started out as an examining body for students taking degrees at a variety of denominational colleges across Winnipeg (including United College, which later went its own way and became the University of Winnipeg); even the University of Toronto got its start as an examining body, responsible for overseeing the work of denominational colleges like Trinity. Eventually, of course, Toronto and Manitoba started providing teaching as well as judging, and eventually all of these institutions became the regular kind of universities we know today, only with really awkward college structures.
Would something like that still work today? Well, in some places it still does. A.C. Grayling’s much-maligned New College of the Humanities in London does not issue its own degrees, but rather prepares students to take the University of London exams. In India, tens of thousands of colleges exist that do nothing but prepare students for examinations from one of the roughly 200 “real” universities (which also teach their own students at their own campuses).
Could we get this genie back out of its bottle by creating a new university, which could test what other universities are doing? Well, this could only work if the new university had a higher level of prestige than the institutions that students were currently attending; otherwise, a student would quite reasonably not bother, and just stick with the degree from the institution s/he was already at. The reason it used to work here is because the colleges were new and had no prestige, whereas the established university (e.g. McGill) or the provincially-mandated organization (e.g. Manitoba) were seen as bigger and better.
In truth, the only way this could work nowadays is if a genuinely stupendous university (say, Harvard) would offer to give degrees to anyone who could pass its exams. But as we’ve seen with the MOOCs saga, the one thing that stupendous universities really don’t want to do is to dilute their perceived exclusiveness by giving out degrees to the hoi polloi. You could set up government institutions to do it, as Korea has done with its Academic Credit Bank and self-study degrees; as innovative as those are, however, they are still seen as second-class degrees as far as prestige is concerned.
Where you could imagine this kind of system working is in developing countries, where a lot of new universities are opening at once (e.g. Kenya, Ghana). Here, new universities might actually attract more students if they could claim that students would earn degrees from the system’s flagship institution. But in our neck of the woods, it’s much harder to see a workable way to divorce teaching from degree-granting.
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PEQAB…..
Enjoy all your posts! Don’t forget licensing exams for professional programs (medicine, veterinary medicine, etc.). These programs have external accrediting bodies that examine, and their examinations do map well to learning objectives and competencies taught in the degree program. Licensing exam results are used as a KPI to assess program quality (along with periodic assessment and accreditation of the program itself, including employment stats and employer surveys, among many other measures). I believe there is a slow trend to professionalize disciplines (e.g. agriculture) that were previously not considered professions, so maybe the trend to external examination may expand over time. This change does require a shared view of what constitutes entry level competencies, which is harder for some disciplines that others. I agree with you on the conflict issue, and I think this external assessment is one of many reason professional programs have retained their prestige, which seems at times to be an anachronism.
Jeff
Would it have to be a “stupendous” university? Remember most students cannot go to such universities and settle for solid second-tier universities. There are a lot more of these and if one broke ranks and decided that they would offer “good” (as opposed to “excellent”) degrees based on summative assessments (examinations, interviews, projects..) at a much lower cost they might reach a scale to really have a global impact.
Great exploration of unbundling teaching and assessment. But who needs the teaching part? What about assessing outcomes of the school of life, as DeakinDigital does?
A for-profit spinoff of Deakin University in Melbourne, they recognize and accredit “Professional Practice” for busy mid-career professionals at the Masters level, based on their *experiential* learning.
They claim their assessment is more rigorous that taking the course work, but is provided at a fraction of the time and cost. The only mandatory coursework relates to the specific subject matter and represents less than 20% of the total credits (probably more like 10%). All other Graduate Learning Outcomes are assessed from targeted evidence packages and interviews in alignment with the AQF at the Masters level: Communication, Collaboration, Critical Thinking, etc.
I have no ownership in the initiative and I’m not sure how it will turn out… but you have to admit it’s a startling model. I’m working to get this kind of thing applied to learning and development in the international humanitarian sector.
Of course, in the Anglo-American context, this system comes from Oxford and Cambridge, both of which would only be a loose affiliation of independent colleges, were it not for the fact that the University grants the degrees and administers the exams. In Cambridge particularly, the University itself is relatively poor — all the vast tracts of land given over many centuries have gone to the colleges.
So the prestige of the colleges comes from wealth and alumni (David Cameron, for example, is keen to tell you he’s an old Orielian), rather than the credentials of the degree.
Enjoyed Alex’s blog on this, but surprised at where it stops . . . since the issue is the quality of the education another (modern) approach is to separately test learning outcomes. And since the outcomes of greatest interest for most university programs are those related to generic skills like, problem-solving, critical thinking, communication, testing each universities results in delivering these through a test like CLA+ is another option. And in fact, this is precisely the direction suggested by the recent paper on the University Funding Formula in Ontario (Focus on Outcomes, Centre on Students).