A global project to measure the knowledge and skill of graduates could break through a tradition of research-heavy rankings. ”I do believe it’s a missing piece in the puzzle of higher education quality because at the moment it’s all assessed by research outcomes,” said James Cook University’s head of engineering Yinghe He, who has served as an expert adviser for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) project. The Melbourne-based Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) is the lead agency of an international consortium chosen by the OECD to carry out a feasibility study in the early stages of the cross-cultural project. ”[If the project succeeds] it will help to counterbalance the predominant focus on research metrics with a focus on education and learning, which we feel will transform the debate about quality in higher education,” principal ACER research fellow Hamish Coates said.The aim of the OECD’s International Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes project is to devise a test for graduate attributes independent of institution, country, culture or language. Although in its very early stages, it is being touted as a university equivalent to the OECD’s global tests for school performance, the PISA tests, which routinely figure in policy and political debate about education. Dr. Coates said the idea was to measure “learning outcomes, people’s capacity to take the knowledge they’ve learned at university and apply that to practical problems … We’re not looking at achievement against curriculum, we’re not looking at highly diffuse skills, we’re looking at [for example] people’s capacity to reason as an engineer.”Source: The Australian