Several Canadian universities and colleges are taking part in a pilot project this fall to test whether students learn “basic skills” such as communication, problem-solving, and critical thinking at post-secondary schools.
The Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO)—an Ontario government research agency—is responsible for the project.
Greg Moran, HEQCO director of special projects, said incoming and graduate students will take a 90-minute online test to see how experienced students are in three areas: literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving in a technology-rich environment.
The project will test up to 900 students at each institution as part of the project.
Students who take part in the test will receive a code they can use to access an online portal and complete the test. It can be done in more than one sitting, and the test results will be available for takers immediately.
He said HEQCO will pick up to four post-secondary institutions in the next two weeks to test the project and then release its full details in the summer.
One of the main goals of the test is to compare first- and upper-year students to see if they actually improve on basic skills during their degree.
“We want to say, ‘look, are these skills enhanced in the course of your studies?’ Obviously they should be,” Moran said.
HEQCO president Harvey Weingarten told the Toronto Star that part of the reason the organization wants to test students is because employers often discover students lacking basic “essential” skills.
The Conference Board of Canada (CBOC), a think tank focused on researching economic trends, has studied what employers look for in job candidates for more than 20 years.
“The results we’ve gotten are very clear that employers want people with a combination of knowledge and skill,” said Michael Bloom, CBOC vice-president of industry and business. “Some graduates at colleges and universities have low levels of literacy and numeracy skills.”
Bloom said universities tend to focus more on knowledge-based teaching. He said some graduates, especially those who don’t speak French or English fluently, lack soft skills important to their job.
“Employers are very often looking for individuals who have skills, good attitude, and an interest in committing to the work,” he said.
If a candidate has “employability” skills, it makes the applicant more valuable to the employer since these skills are transferable, he explained.
The test HEQCO will use for the project was designed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD] and is already used in countries including the United States, Australia, and France.
The test was originally created as a tool to assess skills in a certain population of people to help local governments or organizations provide training and acquire research.
Moran said it would help universities and colleges determine if they need to restructure programs to ensure students are learning the right skills.
“The most important purpose is to get a sense of whether the results of the test is something meaningful and useful, both to students and to the universities and colleges,” he explained.
Moran said the results will give a “narrative description” to students so they can compare their strengths and weaknesses.
If the results of the pilot project are positive, Moran said he’d like to see universities and colleges adopt the test, as its potential benefits could trickle down to students, employers, and the government.
“What I would hope is that individual institutions see this as something that’s valuable to them—to try and give them another measure of how their programs are doing, and introduce new kinds of programs,” he said.
