Competency-based transcripts and information transmission

InsideHigherEd has a very interesting article on the competency based transcripts that Northern Arizona University is now offering to students enrolled in its new competency-based program.  The sample transcript attached to the article shows the competencies that are being assessed, and how a mythical student performed on each of them. 

The transcript is not perfect, but it is a big a step forward! I have long been amazed at higher ed's attachment to its traditional grading system. Faculty speak glowingly of the manifold dimensions of the learning going on in their classes (this is the reason outcome measures are unacceptable, of course), but at the end of the semester, they are happy to sum up the students new-found mastery of these manifold dimensions into a simple letter grade, A-F. The information not contained in this grade is very large, and does a disservice to the students, faculty who will be teaching the students in the future, and future employers who want to know what the students actually know.

Among the information lost in assigning a single grade to the students performance is:any indication of which of these vaunted dimensions of learning the teacher used; the student levels of attainment in those dimensions; and how the dimensions were weighted in summing every thing up to a single letter. Further, two students who got the same letter grade may have differed very significantly in their mastery of the different components of the grade.  

The grade, therefore gives the student very little information as to what her areas of strength and weakness are (feedback important for learning), and gives the faculty member who next will be teaching her very little information about where she really is intellectually. As for employers, Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, is quoted in the InsideHigherEd article: 

Our employer studies show that employers basically find the transcript useless in evaluating job candidates. Higher education definitely needs to start fresh with a redesign of its public descriptions of student accomplishment.

The trick, obviously, is in defining the competencies to be assessed. This is a field in its infancy (see, e.g. Tuning USA), and so most faculty could rightfully take exception to some part of the transcript because of some critical competency that is not there. I personally would have been happy to see some use of aspects of Bloom's Taxonomy to describe the levels of mastery. However, such cavils simply imply that faculty need to be much more active than they have been in the past in describing the manifold dimensions of what they want students to learn in their classes, thus making sure that the appropriate competencies are included.

Faculty often speak of the wonderful outcomes that we can't predict from a higher ed experience. That is obviously true, but if we can't predict it, we obviously are not taking it into account in our current letter grade. Consequently, it is really hard to imagine that we are closing off future possibilities for our students by better describing what we are actually teaching, and how individual students have profited from that teaching.