The engineering community has long since learned a lesson that educators need to be heeding. To quote Dr. Deming, “You cannot inspect quality into the product; it is already there.” When joined with the quote, “We should work on our process, not the outcome of our processes.”, it becomes a methodology that can change the world.
Let me tell you how it all happened. It started with a war. World War II. (It was in all the papers.) Japan essentially was blasted back to the Stone Age. In 1947, Dr. Deming started talking to the Japanese engineers and scientist about his radical ideas about quality control. These ideas included 14 key points for quality management and 7 deadly diseases for killing a business.
And so Total Quality Management was born. The maker of cheap, junk cars (Toyota, Honda, et al) adopted Dr. Deming’s strategies and basically beat the pants off of Chevy and Ford et al. The US manufactures thought that they could inspect every car, correct all the defects and send them on their merry way.
The Japanese did it different. Every defect became a showstopper. Not another car is made until whatever caused the defect is fixed. That defect never happens again. Guess what. Soon you run out of defects. The quality is already there. They didn’t fix the car (process outcome), they fixed the process.
Which brings us to the dark and gloomy world of educational assessment (aka Institutional Effectiveness). Let’s look at a few common practices.
• Exit exams/senior portfolios: OK, this is pure inspection of a process outcome. So what do we do when a product (graduating senior) doesn’t pass inspection? Fix the defect? Fix the process? What is your guess? (None of the above may work in here somewhere, too.)
• All students must take and pass the Computer Competency Exam. Hmmm. Sounds like an inspection, a defect correction, and then hollering “Next.”
You get the idea here. What put American industry in the ditch and what is putting American education there is that the process never gets fixed. In industry, defects produce a shutdown and meeting of ALL stakeholders. No one leaves the meeting until there is a solution and, more importantly, everyone knows what the solution is.
Let’s take an example. Suppose, during a graduation audit, it is discovered that a graduating senior is missing a required course. The correct way to do this is to stop everything, and call everyone in. Faculty, staff, student, dogs, cats……Everyone. The cause of this defect is identified. It may be something as simple as an advising error or as complex as a system failure to monitor student progress between admissions and graduation. Either way, everyone will leave the meeting with a plan to prevent this from ever happening again to anyone.
What happens is an amazing evolution. (OK, not at first. The whine and cry level is phenomenal. “I’ve got stuff to fix. I can’t waste my time in these stupid meetings. “(actual quote)) Then, soon, people start realizing that they aren’t spending as much time putting out fires and are not sitting in dumb quality meetings either. Next thing you know, even new product start ups are running smooth because the quality is built into the process from the git go.
Are academics catching on? Well, the Federal government is now requiring that all online courses have proof that the person taking the test is the person registered for the course. That’s improving the inspection system.
Would it be great if there didn’t need to be a test because the person couldn’t get that far without knowing the material already. How would that work? What if we still used exams but didn’t put names on them? When 85% (or whatever) of the exams are good, the process worked, and all students advance. Test the process, not the product!
