The landscape of assessment in higher education in the United States is changing; stakeholders are calling for an increased level of accountability with evidence of the impact on student learning becoming a pervasive expectation. Student affairs professionals are not exempt from this responsibility; they must be prepared to assess and articulate…

The United States is not doing as well as it could in assessing educational outcomes in the 1980s. The assessment movement of the 1980s indicates that its institutional memory is poor, and when coping with outside pressures, it is slow to recall how it coped the last time it was under pressure. It is important to remember such events and pressures…