When I began organizing the material for my five year evaluation, I discovered that there was no box to check to indicate that I am one of the sponsors for the college’s 50^th Anniversary Gala. While I am sympathetic to the argument that writing a check is not service, a colleague and I made a strategic decision to sponsor the athletic display as part of an on-going strategy to build relationships with college athletes; an overall strategy that provides a service to the college.

Evaluation checklists are problematic when they attempt to reduce service to an easily explained number. Do the points I earn by checking boxes in various categories really demonstrate my service? Or, more importantly, does clicking off the elements in a rubric really demonstrate student learning?

Recently, I had a discussion with a colleague who was developing a library exercise and wanted to know if I thought requiring a minimum of three references was sufficient. I responded that requiring a minimum of three references was, in reality, requiring only three references. Once students hit the magic minimum they stop researching because they have been successful enough to have their box checked.

When I require students to use academic sources in their papers, I am not content to simply see a certain number of citations from peer reviewed journals. I want to make sure that the students understand the content of the articles they are citing, that the content is appropriate for the paper in which it is being cited, and that the academic sources cited accurately reflect the current state of knowledge in the discipline. It is hard to reduce a sophisticated evaluation to a check box.

At other times, our rubrics can be so narrowly defined that we cannot recognize what is actually being accomplished. When I was secretary of the Great Lakes Buddhist Vihara, my English language training benefited an organization whose membership primarily consisted of individuals for whom English is a second language. Because such skills are part of what defines my job at the college, I can check a community service box on my evaluation form; something I would be prohibited from doing had I held the position of treasurer. In other words, I provide service to the community when I am the secretary but, but definition, provide no community service as treasurer.

Recently while doing background reading for their final projects, students have been asking if they can apply what they are learning about history to contemporary issues. Given the check box approach to much of educational assessment, they realize that it is not learning—but the right type of learning—that is counted in the classroom. If my check box only defines learning as knowledge about the historical period for the course, students who are developing critical thinking skills that allow them to analyze contemporary events in an historical context are not learning or, at least, not learning anything worth measuring.

The fact that the checklist I was given for my evaluation is problematic is not a major concern for me. Even though it cannot adequately measure the service I provide to the college, it will be good enough for the purposes for which it is intended. My main concern is when faculty members fool ourselves into believing that inadequate tools adopted at the classroom level actually measure student learning. I am even more concerned when politicians and other policy makers believe that reducing learning to simplistic numbers measures the type of learning our students need to succeed in the 21^th century.

—Steven L. Berg, PhD