... to University of Illinois English professor Gerald Graff--who has famously advocated "teaching the conflicts"--for coming out in favor of outcomes assessment in higher education:

I've become a believer in the potential of learning outcomes assessment, which challenges the elitism of the Best-Student Fetish by asking us to articulate what we expect our students to learn--all of them, not just the high-achieving few--and then holds us accountable for helping them learn it. Whereas the Best-Student Fetish asks who the great students are before we see them, outcomes assessment changes the question to what students can do as a result of seeing us.

Furthermore, once we start asking whether our students are learning what we want them to learn, we realize pretty quickly that making this happen is necessarily a team effort, requiring us to think about our teaching not in isolation but in relation to that of our colleagues.

[...]

For all its obvious value, excellent teaching in itself doesn't guarantee good education. The courses taken in a semester by a high school or college student may all be wonderfully well taught by whatever criterion we want to use, but if the content of the courses is unrelated or contradictory, the educational effect can be incoherence and confusion. As students in todays intellectually diverse university go from course to course, they are inevitably exposed to starkly mixed messages. Though this exposure is often energizing for the high achievers who possess some already developed skill at synthesizing clashing ideas and turning them into coherent conversations, the struggling majority typically resort to giving successive instructors whatever they seem to want even if it is contradictory. Giving instructors what they want (assuming students can figure out what that is) replaces internalizing the norms of the intellectual community--that is, education.

The freedom that is granted us in higher education (at least at high-end and middle-rank institutions) to teach our courses as we please should have always carried an obligation to correlate and align our courses to prevent students from being bombarded with confusing disjunctions and mixed messages. Outcomes assessment holds us to that obligation by making us operate not as classroom divas and prima donnas but as team players who collaborate with our colleagues to produce a genuine program. We all use the P-word glibly, as in "our writing program" or "our literature program," but we have not earned the right to the word if it denotes only a collection of isolated courses, however individually excellent each may be.

By bringing us out from behind the walls of our classrooms, outcomes assessment deprivatizes teaching, making it not only less of a solo performance but more of a public activity. To be sure, with such increased public visibility may come greater vulnerability: Though it is students whose learning is evaluated in outcomes assessment, it is ultimately the faculty whose performance is put in the spotlight. If we have nothing to hide, however, then less secrecy and greater transparency in our classroom practices should work in our favor. At a time when attracting greater financial support for higher education increasingly depends on our ability to demonstrate the value of our work to wider publics, anything that makes teaching more visible and less of a black box figures to be in our interest. Giving teaching a more public face should help humanists doing cutting-edge work refute the widespread stereotype of them as tenured radicals who rule over their classes with iron fists. But it should also help humanists more generally to clarify to a wider public the critical reading and thinking competencies we stand for and to show that those competencies are indispensable enough to the workplace and democratic citizenship to merit greater investment.

What's needed at this point is respected academics like Graff openly advocating for learning assessment, and urging their colleagues to understand the genuine importance it has for their work as educators. As Graff himself points out, articulating what you think students should know and holding yourself accountable for doing all you can to make sure they know it is a matter of simple professional ethics. Academics should be undertaking this work--which is admittedly complex, which takes time, and which requires imagination and ingenuity to do well--voluntarily. They waste everyone's time, and squander their own credibility, when they get their backs up in response to legitimate calls for accountability that come from beyond the academy.

Here's a great quote from the comments to Graff's article:

A little anecdotal evidence to back up Graff's argument. In our history department at a large Western land-grant university, we were dragged kicking and screaming into doing outcomes assessment. We started as simply as possible, assessing just two learning outcomes using two essay-exam responses as our instruments. What we found surprised us. No, it didn't surprise us that our students performed rather badly at some of our outcomes. It did surprise us that the entire assessment process (especially the measuring) led us to the richest, most intellectually engaging, and most useful faculty discussions we’ve ever had about teaching and student learning. I actually look forward to our assessment measurement day (it takes six of us faculty about 5 hours) each semester and the talk about what we might do to improve. Each of us has changed the way she/he teaches, and we will probably change our major in response to what we've found in assessment. And overall the frequency and quality of our talk about teaching and learning is enormously enhanced; there's a buzz on about teaching and learning. We thought we were great teachers before (and we were), but assessment has helped us teach together. Three years ago I never thought I would have said this, but our "culture of teaching and assessment" is much improved. I am certain this wouldn't have happened without assessment.