The Assessment of Student learning begins with Educational values. Assessment is not an end in itself but a vehicle for Educational Improvement. Its effective practice, then, begins with and enacts a vision of the kinds of learning we most value for students and strive to help them achieve. Educational values should drive not only what we choose to assess but also how we do so. Where questions about Educational Mission and values are skipped over, assessment threatens to be an exercise in measuring what's easy, rather than a process of improving what we really care about.  --AAHE, Principles of Good Practice for Assessing Student Learning, 1992.

The purpose of learning outcomes assessment at Hamline University is to ensure that our mission and values are realized in what our graduating students can do.

Hamline’s Strategic Plan for 2007-2012 calls for learning outcomes assessment within and across the schools, programs, departments, and other units of the university.  The implementation of this charge will be driven by our mission and values.  This is not about creating a flurry of paperwork to file away so that we can say we are done with assessment, having not undertaken the hard and ongoing work of truly formative assessment that recognizes and improves student learning.  Nor is this about reviewing programs, faculty, or staff.  And it most certainly is not about homogenizing curricula across programs and thereby losing their distinctive strengths and the essential differences between them. 

This is about doing what we ask our students to do: to think critically and reflectively about what we are doing, how and why we are doing it, and how well we are doing it – and to articulate all this explicitly for ourselves and for others.  Some schools, programs, and departments at Hamline already do this work and do it well, to their credit and to the benefit of their students, faculty, and staff.  As we strive to achieve this level of performance across the university, we will draw upon the experience of these programs and the models for learning outcomes articulation and assessment they provide.