Letters: How Can We Best Measure College Success?

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In "Who Will Hold Colleges Accountable?" (Op-Ed, Dec. 10), Kevin Carey discusses the problem of establishing meaningful academic standards in higher education and the uses and misuses of credits and grading to assess academic accomplishment.

An approach to solving this problem? Simply eliminate credit hours and grades for individual courses, replacing these largely meaningless measures of academic accomplishment with a broad oral examination that is administered at the end of the students' academic program.

This approach, used at German (and other) European universities (I attended Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen, 1961-62, and taught at Kiel in 1975), avoids the need to grade student performance in individual courses. In the degree examination, the student is given the opportunity to prove that he has gained the requisite knowledge and knows what to do with it, particularly to prove that he has learned how to think, so central to the university experience.

DONALD A. KLEIN
Fort Collins, Colo., Dec. 12, 2012

The writer is a professor of microbiology at Colorado State University.

To the Editor:

Kevin Carey suggests that the most promising solution to the credit-hour issue is a system where common standards are established for what students need to know, and be able to do. In fact, since 2000, the engineering, engineering technology, computer science and applied science community has had in place an accreditation system that does exactly that.

Accreditation in these fields is voluntary and based on meeting threshold standards using learning outcomes-based criteria. The system is developed and carried out by volunteers from academe and industry, drawn from relevant professional and technical disciplines.

More than 3,200 programs at 671 institutions in the United States (and 23 other countries) are accredited under this system.

MICHAEL MILLIGAN
Baltimore, Dec. 13, 2012

The writer is executive director of ABET, the main accrediting agency in the United States for technical education.