Dear Commons Community,

The Carnegie credit unit as a standard of college credit has been the subject of debate in recent years especially in light of developments such as competency-based education.  The issue is revisited in a new report as described in the The Chronicle of Higher Education:

“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 today 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.

In its report Carnegie acknowledges the difficulties that the credit hour can present to the allocation of financial aid, the development of curricula with alternative pacing, and innovations that make education more flexible and learning outcomes more transparent…

Perhaps the most compelling argument for the Carnegie Unit is that no one has come up with a better system. “The crux of the issue is measuring time is easy, measuring learning is hard,” said Amy Laitinen, deputy director for higher education at New America, formerly the New America Foundation, and author of Cracking the Credit Hour.

Colleges need to create a culture centered on student learning, but that is not happening systematically, she said.

“Until we have some agreement upon what the unit is—the learning unit is—we don’t have much of a choice other than to rest on this time-based notion,” she said.

It will be a long time before there is agreement on a suitable replacement for the credit-hour. And until there is,  innovations such as competency-based education will remain on the fringes of education more so than the mainstream.

Tony