Competency based assessment in higher education have raised people's concern. Especially those in the academic world. In this article, I will try to address those concerns. For the very least, I think it's an oppotunities for academic professionals to re-visit the daily practice and see if anything can be done in a more quantitative way.

In general, degree programs are composed of courses for student to take. After complete enough courses with passing grades students are award with a degree. The general assumption is that if students can pass courses with acceptible grades they achieve acceptable education, trainings or whatever that might mean. As we all know, in general, freedom are given to instructors to choose whatever method they think is appropriate in measuring the success. This may dependend on the fields of study, the institution where instruction is taken place and maybe even depend on which instructor in the same department. Institutions enjoy that freedom and instructors enjoy that freedom. Whatever the student achieved including things that are claimed to be hard to measure by standard tests. Skills like critical thinking are a frequently quoted benifit of traditional academic programs.

One thing we need to understand is that the promotion of competency based assessment is NOT equal to the demotion of academic standard to the vocational standard. This is a false perceptoin. It is true that vocational school, in general, teaching things that can be easily evaluated with standard test but this does not mean only things that taught at vocational school can be evaluated with standard test. As an evidence, a lot of things taught in academic environments are evaluated with standard test type evaluations - i.e. the grades are objective rather than subjective. This probably covers almost all engineering and natural science classes.

A good question to ask at this point is: Do academic engineer students acquire the critical thinking skills and if they do, where they acquire those skills? This will help us identify elements that help students building those skills. This will help us better understand how these skills can be measured.

Even if we can't easily measure those claimed skills, organizations can still test their applicants on other training. For high level workers, organizations can select those do take courses that building the critical thinking skills.

So, the promotion of competency based assessment do not lower the demands of high level workers but helping those worker stand out. In fact, it can help promoting production of high level worker - when the benifit is seen and is conveyed to potential students and general public.

Conclusion:
The clear the things be presented, the more the society will benifit. This idea is simply true. This is the same idea for those who calling for clear labeling on academic vs. nonacademic. The promoting of competency based assessment can only make things clearer. Even in the case we can't clear all the issues, we are making progress. Let's close this article with some examples:

In the past, people claimed the Earth is flat while others claimed the Earth is round. Without making the REAL efforts to sort things out, the two camp will shouting at each other forever.

Music is considered an art and most people will agree it fall in the hard to measured skill catagories. However, the development of the theories, the chords, the physics behind the music all made contributions to the advance of musics. These theories are consider among the basic knowledge and are frequently tested.