UNO tops nation in adding value

UNO was ranked first in the nation in students' intellectual growth between their freshman and senior years by the Collegiate Learning Assessment, placing UNO ahead of many prestigious universities such as Duke University, the University of Texas and the University of North Carolina."The CLA purports to measure value-added at an institution, and for this test, for this measure, for this year, we finished at the top of the list," said Steven Bullock, interim assistant vice chancellor for academic affairs.

The online exam was administered by UNO officials to a randomly selected group of 225 freshmen and 100 seniors over the course of last year.

Student performance on the exam when they came to UNO was at the 9th percentile, Bullock said. By the time they left, it was at the 86th percentile - the highest growth of any university.

"I think it presents us in a very positive light and justifiably so," Bullock said. "Our faculty are truly outstanding when it comes to teaching, and we take teaching very seriously, we take pride in our teaching, and this is a testament to that."

Academic help services around campus ensure that students realize their full potential.

"The Writing Center, the Speech Center, the Math-Science Learning Center - they're addressing the needs of hundreds of students and they seem to be doing so very effectively," Bullock said. "So I think that's a big part of it."

This is the first time UNO participated in the test conceived by the Council for Aid to Education, a privately funded organization whose benefactors include Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Ford Foundation.

Each student is assigned an "expected" CLA score based on their ACT score.

"Our freshman did not do as well as their ACT might indicate on the CLA," Bullock said.

On the other hand, the seniors over-performed compared to their ACT.

The CAE sends the grades for each section and subsection of the exam to the university to help identify students' academic needs.

"They really encourage institutions to use them primarily for internal purpose; we just see this as an additional tool in looking at how our students are doing," Bullock said.

Providing a basis for inter-institutional comparison is listed under "benefits and uses of CLA" on the CAE Web site, cae.org.

It is controversial to use student learning to compare schools because it is hard to measure, and upper-tier colleges like Duke are at a disadvantage because their students "have less room for growth," added Bullock.

UNO received some criticism for exaggerating the significance of the results.

"We fully expect a college that happens to score very well to boast about it," said Richard Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges, in an e-mail message to "Inside Higher Education."

"That's what UNO is doing, and I don't fault the university for playing up a distinctive characteristic," Elkman wrote. "UNO may be pushing it a little far - to imply that if you enroll there, you're guaranteed to learn more than at ABC University - but that's the admissions game these days."

Bullock, however, said the exam does provide a lot of credibility to UNO's message.

"The fact that this is a nationally recognized exam: it has a lot of validity," Bullock said. "Lots of statisticians have taken a look at this and they've determined that this is a really good test. It's not flawless, obviously, as is the case with any standardized exam."

The ACT measures the academic caliber of incoming students, but until the CLA was used there was nothing to measure the learning gains made by seniors throughout their undergraduate careers.

"Studies that measure the value added of college are the gold standard of higher education assessment," Ernest Pascarella, a professor of higher education at the University of Iowa, said on the CLA Web site.

The CLA is an all essay test because "life is not life a multiple choice test, with four or five simple choices for every problem," according to the Web site.

The exam is designed to measure critical thinking skills in a non-discipline specific way. Test-takers face complex, ambiguous problems that require analytical thinking and the ability to bring together information from multiple sources.