To judge the progress of students’ critical thinking and communication skills, many colleges are now testing first-years and seniors to measure their learning from enrollment to graduation.

The assessment movement has allowed parents, prospective students and government regulators to measure the value colleges add to students’ education, although some college leaders have mixed feelings on the merits of the assessments.

Currently, more than 100 schools have voluntarily published results from the new learning assessments. After eight years of administering the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), University of Texas administrators found that UT students as a whole score well on the test, but the results also show that seniors do not perform much better than first-years.

The CLA is a Web administered assessment program developed by the Council for Aid to Education that measures how an institution as a whole contributes to student development and learning. The assessment is a national effort that provides colleges and universities with information about their students’ performances on critical thinking, analytical reasoning and coherent writing. All higher education institutions espouse progress in these three fields. Even so, there is little evidence regarding to what extent improvement on these criteria is actually achieved.

Sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa used CLA results to critique American higher education. After giving the assessment to 24 public and private colleges, the sociologists concluded that only 36 percent of students showed significant learning gains from their first to senior years.

University leaders have used the results along with additional research data to make improvements in classroom teaching.

“I thought it was a revelation,” said Jeff Abernathy, president of Alma College. “It’s hard data about student learning across all the disciplines of higher education.”

Several years ago, the Council of Independent Colleges organized a group of private schools to administer the CLA and share findings. Only a few of the private schools revealed their assessment results, but 144 public universities have posted scores on a site called College Portraits under the Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA).

However, critics contend that the College Portraits site has its flaws: many colleges offer only minimal performance data, with little context on what the scores mean. Additionally, fewer than half of the 319 VSA participants have kept their pledge to post scores by the year’s end.

People like William “Brit” Kirwan, the Maryland State University chancellor, have doubts that the VSA-endorsed tests are the right ones to measure learning.

“If the right test came along, I would be pretty insistent that everyone in the University of Maryland system use it,” he said.

Some students also express negative opinions on the learning assessment movement.

“Personally, I don’t think there could ever possibly be a correct way to measure learning,” Mary Roh ’12 said. “Each student learns something different and gains different knowledge during their college career.”