Faculty new to higher education have entered a world already circumscribed by assessment practices that may seem normal and transparent, but the increasing impacts of these practices have redefined the content as well as contours of teaching and learning in the three or more decades since they started to take hold. Administrations, boards of trustees, accrediting agencies, and legislatures have insisted on accountability without necessarily having experience in what is being accounted for and have fostered a distrust of faculty members as the authorities on their own practices. As a result, higher education has been undergoing the kind of cultural upheaval that took place in elementary and secondary education more than fifty years ago

Long, Ada

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University of Nebraska - Lincoln 
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Journal of the National Collegiate Honors 
Council --Online Archive National Collegiate Honors Council 
2014 
Editor’s Introduction 
Ada Long 
University of Alabama - Birmingham, adalong@uab.edu 
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Long, Ada, "Editor’s Introduction" (2014). Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council --Online 
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ix
Editor’s introduction
Ada Long
University of Alabama at Birmingham
Faculty new to higher education have entered a world already circum-
scribed by assessment practices that may seem normal and transparent, but 
the increasing impacts of these practices have redefined the content as well 
as contours of teaching and learning in the three or more decades since they 
started to take hold . Administrations, boards of trustees, accrediting agencies, 
and legislatures have insisted on accountability without necessarily having 
experience in what is being accounted for and have fostered a distrust of fac-
ulty members as the authorities on their own practices . As a result, higher 
education has been undergoing the kind of cultural upheaval that took place 
in elementary and secondary education more than fifty years ago .
Honors programs may have been slower than most academic units to 
feel the impacts of the accountability movement since they have tradition-
ally carved out their own space for innovation, personal attention, original 
research, sense of community, and liberal-arts culture within the larger insti-
tution, but assessment has come to honors in a big way during the past decade 
and is now virtually universal in honors programs and colleges . Honors 
administrators have often tried to take control of the process by developing 
their own assessment systems—sometimes successfully, sometimes not . In 
either case, discussions of assessment in honors now tend to focus on the best 
ways to do it, not on whether it should be done or how it is changing the 
climate of honors, so it is important to ask these basic questions, and Joan 
Digby, who has seen it all, both asks and answers .
Digby leads off the JNCHC Forum on “Rubrics, Templates, and Measur-
able Outcomes in Honors” with her essay “My Objections to Outcome [Note 
the Singular] Assessment .” A Call for Papers went out on the NCHC website 
and listserv and in the NCHC E-Newsletter, inviting members to contribute 
to the Forum . The Call included a list of questions that Forum contributors 
might consider:
Have rubrics and templates made teaching in honors easier or harder? 
What is the purpose of rubrics (or templates or both)? Whom do 
they benefit and how? What does a teacher’s use of rubrics imply 
about his or her image of students? What does it imply about a teach-
er’s philosophy of learning? Are rubrics and templates inherently 
inconsistent with creativity? Under what circumstances are rubrics 
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x
(or templates) appropriate and effective in honors education? Do 
rubrics help students understand what a teacher expects of them, and 
is this understanding an asset or detriment to good education? What 
cultural, social, and/or educational trend(s) gave rise to the use of 
rubrics, templates, and/or quantitative outcomes assessment? Have 
rubrics and templates improved the quality of honors education, and 
how? Given the requirements that legislatures, administrations, and 
the public have made for accountability of academic programs, what 
are the alternatives to quantifiable data? Is there a generation gap (or 
a gender gap) among teachers in attitudes about rubrics and tem-
plates and measurable outcomes?
The Forum includes four responses to the Call for Papers in addition to Dig-
by’s lead essay . To one degree or other, all the responses take issue with Digby 
and defend measurable outcomes and rubrics .
In both style and content, Digby’s essay represents the passion, creativ-
ity, and intelligence that we associate with honors, spiced up with humor 
and a dash of vitriol . With the “tools” of etymology, history, literature, and 
common sense, she does battle against the tools of rubrics, templates, and 
measurable outcomes, decrying the reductive, fill-in-the-boxes nature of 
assessment whereby students become quantifiable data rather than original 
thinkers . Digby argues that “if we don’t defend the virtues of imagination and 
spontaneity in our classes, we will all be teaching from rigid syllabi according 
to rubrics and templates spelled out week by week as teachers of fifth-grade 
classes are forced to do .” Her essay is a call to action against the “absurdly 
regimented, generally fictitious, and misnamed goals and objectives” that kill 
inspiration and turn education into busywork .
Annmarie Guzy begins and ends her response to Digby’s essay with her 
confession that she measures outcomes and that she might be like Digby’s 
young colleagues at LIU Post: “rather than shouting from the parapet against 
measurable outcomes, I acknowledge with a grumble, a sigh, and a rolling 
of my eyes that number-crunching is a permanent part of today’s academia .” 
In “An Effective Honors Composition Class Improves Honors Retention 
Rates: Outcomes and Statistical Prestiditigation,” she describes the useful-
ness of some kinds of data collection, such as the graduation rates of her 
former honors composition students at the University of South Alabama; at 
the same time, she objects to the use of such data to dictate teaching meth-
ods or to standardize course content . Numbers are useful but also potentially 
Editor’s introduction
xi
dangerous, and they are not a substitute for thoughtful discussion and analy-
sis of what is effective in the classroom .
While Guzy offers a highly qualified and restricted defense of objective 
measurements, Beata Jones and Catherine Wehlburg of Texas Christian Uni-
versity are enthusiastic and unqualified advocates of rubrics and assessment 
in their essay “Learning Outcomes Assessment Misunderstood: Glass Half-
Empty or Half-Full .” They argue that learning outcomes and ways to measure 
progress toward them are essential to good teaching; otherwise, they write, 
we cannot know if students are learning what we want them to learn or even 
know what it is that we want them to learn . In support of outcomes assess-
ment as a valuable educational tool, they provide a long list of its advantages 
to teaching and learning in honors . They compare the responses of resistant 
faculty to the stages of grief over death or loss, contending that the time has 
come for acceptance because outcomes assessment is both inevitable and 
desirable .
Like Jones and Wehlberg, Giovanna Walters of Minnesota State Univer-
sity, Mankato, defends the use of rubrics as important to good teaching in her 
essay “On Assessment, Imagination, and Agency: Using Rubrics to Inform 
and Negotiate the Honors Experience .” Walters argues that the design of 
rubrics is, in itself, an act of creativity when it produces “a working, fluid, and 
negotiable document that allows students to pursue success in a variety of 
ways; it should state what students need to accomplish without being pre-
scriptive in how they get to that point .” She further argues that teachers, like 
students, cannot know if they are successful in meeting their goals if they do 
not know in advance what their goals are . Rubrics provide a means to define 
the goals and measure success, ensuring accountability in a way that provides 
necessary guidance to teachers as well as students .
We conclude the Forum on “Rubrics, Templates, and Measurable Out-
comes in Honors” with an interesting suggestion of how to reconcile rubrics 
with student-centered learning and empowerment . In “Collaborative Design: 
Building Task-Specific Rubrics in the Honors Classroom,” Ce Rosenow 
describes an innovative strategy she uses at Lane Community College for 
blending rubrics with creativity . In her capstone honors seminar, the students 
design the rubrics themselves, collaborating with each other to develop the 
criteria by which they will be assessed, making them part of the assessment 
process rather than the targets of it . While Digby describes rubrics as a means 
“to measure students based on preconceived expectations,” if the students 
themselves establish the expectations, then rubrics can become a space for 
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xii
critical thinking, creativity, and active learning . Rosenow offers specific and 
useful ideas about how to incorporate her collaborative approach to rubrics 
into various components of an honors seminar, including a final symposium .
An analogy to foreign travel arises from the essays in this Forum . Digby 
advocates unscheduled travel in which the voyager has a sense of the territory 
but chooses to wait and discover what there is to find . In contrast, most of 
the responders use rubrics and measurements as a kind of preset itinerary to 
make sure that they arrive on time at the places they have decided to find .
The first research essay in this JNCHC issue is “Using Iceland as a Model 
for Interdisciplinary Honors Study” by Kim Andersen and Gary Thorgaard, 
who advocate a holistic approach to honors-level study: “Interdisciplinary 
teaching always focuses on disciplines as well as the connections between 
them, the ‘disciplinary’ being balanced by the ‘inter .’ What is sought is 
another consciousness, a practical understanding liberated from disciplinary 
perspectives .” They offer the example of an upper-division course on Iceland 
they have taught in the Washington State University Honors College . In this 
course, Andersen’s research background in Icelandic sagas and Thorgaard’s 
in the genetics of fish broadened into a focus on “culture, environment, 
genetics, and economics .” Along with a reflection on the nature and value 
of interdisciplinary study, the authors have provided a model for a place-
based, interdisciplinary honors course and a fascinating analysis of the bridge 
between Iceland’s past and present .
In “Generative Intersections: Supporting Honors through College Com-
position,” Heather C . Camp of Minnesota State University, Mankato, provides 
arguments in favor of maintaining first-year composition as a key component 
of honors education . She notes that the increase in Advanced Placement 
courses and dual-enrollment programs has led to the gradual displacement 
of first-year composition in honors programs, a trend that has diminished the 
quality of education we offer our students and worked to the detriment of 
their future success . She suggests that three recent developments in the field 
of writing studies should make first-year composition more valuable to honors 
programs than in the past: “the field’s increased attentiveness to reading as an 
area of emphasis, its growing interest in metacognition and learning transfer, 
and its potential for facilitating digital engagement .” Honors administrators 
who have allowed composition to atrophy within their curriculum would do 
well to take another look at the value of first-year honors composition .
The final two essays in this issue of JNCHC focus on honors education 
at community colleges, starting with “Honors and the Completion Agenda: 
Editor’s introduction
Identifying and Duplicating Student Success” by Jay Trucker of the Com-
munity College of Baltimore County, Dundalk Campus . Having noticed that 
“many of today’s honors success stories at CCBC were yesterday’s dropouts 
and underachievers,” Trucker designed a research project that, after track-
ing the success of developmental students in honors at all the campuses of 
CCBC, recommended strategies for recruiting for honors from that popu-
lation of students . He argues that honors can help developmental students 
succeed in college, provide the advantage of honors to a larger population of 
potentially strong students, boost the size of the honors program, increase 
the program’s diversity, and improve the transfer and graduation rates of the 
institution . Based on his research, Trucker suggests that honors programs in 
two-year and/or open-admissions colleges would benefit from “partnering 
with developmental education and college orientation programs, institution-
alizing the solicitation of honors recommendations, and enlisting honors 
program students to serve as unofficial travel guides .”
Finally, in “Why Honors is a Hard Sell in the Community College,” 
Deborah Engelen-Eigles and Janice Levinsohn Milner of Century College 
echo some of the themes in Jay Trucker’s research . The authors address the 
seeming contradiction between the academic focus of honors and the current 
tendency to define the role of community colleges as job-training for low-level 
employment . They suggest a subversive role for honors programs at commu-
nity colleges given their potential to disrupt the social, racial, and intellectual 
stratification that starts in grade school and hardens in the implicit tracking 
that takes place in college options . Honors programs can address and rectify 
the often false assumptions by and about students at two-year colleges .
xiii



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