Here’s a story in Florida about bringing standardized tests to higher education in the same way some of them have been brought to K-12. It mentions the U.S. Commission on the Future of Higher Education and its insistence on the need to measure student learning, one way being to have students take a low-stakes exit exam in basic skills and knowledge. The university leaders cited in the article oppose the measure, making the usual objections about the uniformity of the tests, the difficulty of settling upon test content, and the inability to measure “critical thinking.” But the attempt to find out just how much knowledge and skills young people acquire from their course work is so commonsensical a proposal that it won’t be stopped by administrators worried about the performance of their schools becoming a public issue. What could be worse, to them, than having the test scores of their graduating seniors included in the criteria of U.S. News & World Report’s college ranking, or added to the descriptions in Fiske’s guide to colleges and universities? What would make them work harder to shore up their curricula?