SEAHO Report - Fall 2020 - 16

FEATURE ARTICLES

The Seven
Deadly Sins

of Assessment
Paul Lentz, University of North Carolina Greensboro

The seven deadly sins are a series of vices in
traditional Christian teachings that push us
further from divinity. Several great literary
works outline these sins, from Dante's
Divine Comedy and Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, to
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Try as we may,
these sins still work their way into our
personal and professional lives. One place
they live is in our assessment work. While
assessment sins may not affect our divinity,
they can affect our understanding of our
students and communities. Below you will
find a few examples of how these failings of
human nature impact our assessment.

PRIDE: Pride in one's work is naturally
a good thing; however, pride in our work
is problematic when it roots us in our
past ways of doing things even if there is
evidence that there is a better way of doing
that work. Pride as a sin makes us unable
to recognize that there may be a different,
better way of doing something. Many people
are familiar with the mindset of "Well, we
have always done things this way" and the
barrier to progress this creates. If you are
willing to assess something but not make
changes, then what was the point of doing
the assessment? When we assess something
to determine its efficacy and choose to
ignore the results or try making changes as
suggested, often we are letting our pride get
in the way.
The solution to pride is to find its opposite
virtue, humility. Understand the way we
have always done things is not always the
most effective. Do not be scared to make
changes, continually assess and change
based on needs of the communities we serve.
If an assessment is completed and tells us

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something we do not want to see, such as a
program not being as effective as we hoped,
find the humility to go back to the drawing
board utilizing the new information you
have.

WRATH: Many people look upon

assessment as a negative process meant to
poke holes and find out what we are doing
wrong. It is, however, quite the opposite.
Assessment is never a negative process.
Assessment should be used to inform and
improve, not to minimize and shame. Some
of this is, admittedly, semantics, but goes a
long way in making assessment a positive
process. For example, we never assess to
determine what we are doing wrong; we
assess to determine what we are doing right,
and what we can improve upon. For example,
when you meet with a supervisor and they
tell you what you can improve upon and help
you achieve that growth, this is a positive
process. When you meet with a supervisor
and they tell you what you are doing wrong,
this conveys a very different message. Just
as we all have areas of growth, so do the
programs and initiatives we assess.

GLUTTONY: The sin of gluttony revolves
around overindulgence. Do not overindulge
your assessments. We should be careful not
to over-apply results of our assessments.
If one assesses upper-class apartment
students' preferences on programming, does
that necessarily reflect a first-year student's
opinion? If you want to have an inference
on the first-year student population, add a
first-year sample block to your sample and
report both. This gives us richer inference on
what both populations may have thought and
what the differences may be.
SEAHO Report - Fall 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of SEAHO Report - Fall 2020
