Center for American Progress

Credit Hours Cannot Accurately Measure Student Achievement
Article

Credit Hours Cannot Accurately Measure Student Achievement

Moving from credit hours to a competency-based model of measuring student achievement will have many benefits for students when they begin to look for employment.

Part of a Series
idea light bulb

The credit hour is currently the basic unit of measurement for student progress in higher education in the United States. The credit hour informs aspects of administration of higher-education institutions throughout the United States, including establishing teaching loads and graduation requirements, and is the basic structural unit of most college-level courses as well as the basis for federal student aid.

Despite this fact, the term was formally undefined until 2010 when the U.S. Department of Education reluctantly defined a credit hour as the amount of work associated with intended learning outcomes that can be verified with evidence of student achievement.

There is growing dissatisfaction with credit hours, however, because they measure time instead of educational attainment and fail to provide any useful understanding of what students actually learned. This criticism is heard most loudly in the debate around credit transfers from one institution to another. In reality, however, this distrust of credits earned elsewhere reflects the fact that it’s difficult to place accurate value on earned credits even though those hours came at a great price to the student, his or her family, and taxpayers.

For more on this topic, please see:

The positions of American Progress, and our policy experts, are independent, and the findings and conclusions presented are those of American Progress alone. A full list of supporters is available here. American Progress would like to acknowledge the many generous supporters who make our work possible.

Explore The Series

Previous
Next