Good intention, bad idea

The federal Department of Education (DOE) has been considering mandating standardized testing for college students. It hopes to obtain large amounts of data that could be analyzed with the ultimate purpose of improving higher education in the United States. While we laud the DOE for its serious pursuit of educational reform, we see the possibility of mandatory standardized testing as an intrusion on the core, liberal educational mission of Princeton and many of its peers as well as being an ineffective way to ensure that colleges and universities are successfully educating their students.

Students come to Princeton and other universities to study a wide range of topics and to specialize in different areas. We are encouraged to delve deeply into the study of certain disciplines and fields. Of course, Princeton has distribution requirements. Other universities, including Columbia, the University of Chicago and, to cite the most famous example, St. John's College, go so far as to require core curricula. Even these curricula would be harmed by the need to teach to a standardized test, and their merit cannot be assessed by one universal test. College is a time to move away from standardization into a kind of intellectual rigor and subtlety that cannot be encapsulated in an optically scanned bubble. If many college educations are not rigorous, if there are too many federally funded students studying communications, marketing, journalism and other (vocational) disciplines whose educational merit, rigor and societal benefits rightfully deserve to be questioned, the federal government should not intrude on students who intensively and seriously study, for example, physics, history or Slavic languages. The government should instead consider not funding the former in the future.

As we recognized last spring, the federal government has and should have the right to impose certain stipulations on the billions of dollars of funding that it gives annually to institutions of higher education. We praise the DOE for wanting to ensure that each of these institutions uses this aid effectively and deserves its renewal. But standardized testing is not the way to do this. The DOE should instead look first toward the accrediting bodies and the accreditation process as access points where it might apply pressure to bolster the strength of U.S. higher education. It should also consider funding the development and expansion of courses like Princeton's own Humanities Sequence and Integrated Science at other universities that currently lack such programs.