Our challenge as a small college who bearsChrist’s name is to develop assessment methods deeply consistent with our biblical assumptions and our distinctively Christian institutional character--and bear His name in vain.

1

Assessment must begin with Christian assumptions. Assessment is not neutral. It is one of the “whatevers” in “Whatever we do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus” (Col. 3:17).  What we do, how we do it, and how we evaluate what and how we do at our colleges must be faithfully Christian from the foundations up, if we are to build, by God’s grace, a faithful Christian academic culture. If we uncritically import non-Christian elements into our work (idols, false gods, secular assumptions, etc.), we will quickly end up with a double-minded culture, following two masters. We must not be double-minded or plunder Egypt ’s gold only to fashion new idols of our own. Assessment that begins with secular assumptions, bows to the pagan academic gods, or fashions new idols is anathema.

2

Assessment must fit the institution. Small Christian colleges are—surprisingly—small. Any assessment plan must acknowledge that obvious fact and not pressure them to become something they are not and were never conceived to be. The personnel and financial resources devoted to assessment must be consistent with and proportional to the institution’s vision and size—not dictated by some one-size-fits-all model conceived at some godless degree mill or imposed by the bureaucratic reporting needs of some agency. Assessment at small institutions that becomes bureaucratically or financially burdensome can bloat small colleges into looking and acting like their larger peers. Such an assessment plan does not assess; it corrupts in the name of assessment.  An assessment plan that expects small institutions to act like they are not is anathema.

3

Assessment at small colleges must be personal. We believe in a personal, Triune God who made us in His image. We must give a personal account to Him at the eschaton for everything we do in the academy. That will be the ultimate Personal Assessment. What we have done to the least of our personal students, He will consider as a personal action toward Himself. Numbers and numerical data can be useful in their place, but they are always depersonalized abstractions, one or more steps removed from the persons and the personal “data” they ostensibly represent. Secular materialists idolize the impersonal, because they acknowledge no personal God above their own noggins. Assessment at Christian institutions that ignores or minimizes personal accountability and personal methods of accountability (interviews, conversations, talk between people, etc.) is anathema.

4

Assessment should embody our Christian values. Our Christian institutions should be models of academic honesty, integrity, and responsibility—blameless, trustworthy, not overbearing, not pursuing dishonest gain, upright, self-controlled, holy, and disciplined (Titus 1:7-9). How we give an account to others, how we assess our own deeds, should be consistent with our deepest Christian beliefs and institutional commitments. Our assessment plans, therefore, should embody, down to the bone, biblical truths and the Trinitarian worldview we profess in our Foundational Standards. Unfortunately, the dominant models for assessment today come from institutions which deny Christ, reject our Christian values, and/or share little in common with our Christian institutions. Christian college assessment that does not embody Christian values is anathema.

          5         

Assessment should reflect the truth, goodness and beauty of the Gospel itself. We do not describe our spouses in biochemical or economic terms, and neither should we describe our lovely Christian institutions in the sterile and lifeless prose of social science. Any assessment report that is more crassly functionalistic than rhetorically beautiful, coldly rational than poetically spiritual is anathema.

1. Plan for Evaluating Institutional Effectiveness