The first and most important step in establishing a useful end-of-course assessment system is creating a positive cultural and organizational context. Many failures in the implementation of an otherwise good system can be attributed to a lack of executive commitment combined with a lack of perspective sharing and education for everyone in the value chain. The president and chief academic officer must voice a strong and unambiguous commitment to the process, making clear that it is an important component of the institution’s quality management system. Deans and department heads should follow suit. Instructors and/or proctors should receive training to understand that the usefulness of the process rests on the affirmative commitment they convey to students regarding the process.

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Since 1985, my research team and I have developed, validated, deployed, analyzed, and reported findings on more than ten million end-of-course assessments administered in more than 500,000 courses. This 25 year span of work has brought me face-to-face with more practical problems, more challenges to validity and usefulness, and more inferential dead-ends than I could have imagined at the outset. The experience has also demonstrated that a well-designed, well implemented, and well used end-of-course assessment process provides invaluable guidance with which an institution can manage its processes effectively. Process management guided this way will mitigate much of the risk in outcomes assessment, where it is too late to effect remediation. Like turn-by-turn GPS, decision-support provided by end-of-course assessments ensures that students, instructors, curriculum, and support services remain harmoniously on course, working in unison to achieve the desired outcome.Equally important is the fact that these benefits mature and deepen with use. . . .

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