Professor Van Ry

The Carnegie Unit has been around for more than a century, and unless someone can come up with a better way of tracking college credit, it won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. It presents challenges, but it has value because it sets minimum instructional standards.

That’s the conclusion of a report being released [last week] by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The report, “The Carnegie Unit: A Century-Old Standard in a Changing Education Landscape,” examines the role of the Carnegie Unit, more commonly called the credit hour, in an ever-evolving world of education.

The authors of the report looked into the Carnegie Unit and its relationship to various elements of education reform, specifically transparency and flexibility in regard to the design and delivery of education, both in elementary and secondary schools and in postsecondary education.

Critics of the Carnegie Unit have argued that it is a poor indication of how much students have learned, given that it emphasizes how much time people spend in the classroom rather than how much knowledge they have gained. <Read more.>

Via Casey Fabris, The Chronicle of Higher Education.