ABSTRACT
This is a time of fundamental curricular change within American colleges, universities, and centers of higher education. Hartle (1986), a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington, DC, affirms in The Growing Interest in Measuring the Educational Achievement of College Students : “After two decades of focusing on issues of equal opportunity and student access, the emphasis is increasingly on educational quality and the intellectual skills of students” (p. 1). The article appears in Assessment in American Higher Education (Adelman, 1986), the germinal volume published by the U.S. Office of Educational Research and Improvement on the question of academic accountability for students, faculty members, and institutions. As Secretary of Education Bennett states in the foreword to the volume: “There is wide agreement that the quality of undergraduate liberal arts education at a number of colleges and universities is not what it should be” (p. i). He continues: “We have all heard reports that many of our graduates do not possess the knowledge, skills, or, in some cases, the civic virtues of a well-educated person” (p. i).
