In January 2011, the Lumina Foundation published its Degree Qualifications Profile (DQP) to challenge faculty and academic leaders in the U.S. to think deeply and concretely about aligning expectations for student learning outcomes across higher education. Since then, the DQP has kindled extensive discussions about what the postsecondary degrees granted by American colleges and universities really mean with respect to what graduates know and can do. But the text of the DQP itself provides only limited guidance to stakeholders with respect to assessment. In order to render the Profile's potential real, institutions and their faculties will need to develop consistent and systematic ways to gather evidence that the competencies that the DQP describes are actually being mastered at the levels claimed. In this paper, I explore some of what needs to be done in this area and provide a few tools and techniques (some of which are already in widespread use) that may help us move forward. In offering them, I invite faculties at all our colleges and universities to carefully examine what the DQP asks us to do in designing more aligned and integrated approaches to teaching, learning, and determining student competence--as well as to actively experiment with these ideas and techniques with their colleagues. (Contains 13 footnotes.) [Foreword by George Kuh and Stan Ikenberry and Afterword by Carol Geary Schneider.]