We Anglophones are very fond of ambiguity in our vocabulary. Take, for example, the word “standardization.” Throughout American history, it has been used in equal measure for good and evil. To many, it speaks of streamlined efficiency, borderless equality and accessibility for all. Nationally standardizing language, for example, was hailed as one of the many great communicative achievements of the printing press. From another perspective, the word carries connotations of multiple biases, creeping homogeneity and over-simplification. Whenever you decide to “standardize” something, someone always loses – in the case of language, it was the poor, the immigrants and the isolated who suddenly dropped a few castes due to their ignorance of the new rules, and we doomed a whole library of dialectical linguistic history in the bargain.The Commission on the Future of Higher Education, appointed by our president’s aptly named Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, has been wrestling with the connotational ambiguity of “standardization” since 2006. They seem to have finally come to a conclusion with the launch of the “College Portrait” Web site. Voluntary at present, the site aims to help prospective college students (and, of course, their parents) make decisions about picking a school based on a number of different `datasets,’ using information gathered from within participating universities. This sounds immensely helpful until you notice that one of the burgeoning ideas fueling the scheme is the incorporation of standardized testing in colleges. It seems that many administrators of state and land-grant schools are hopping onto the standardized-testing bandwagon.We are all familiar with the notion of standardized testing for high-school level education. According to FairTest.org and several other pressure groups, the process “reward[s] the ability to quickly answer superficial questions that do not require real thought. They do not measure the ability to think or create in any field. Their use encourages a narrowed curriculum, outdated methods of instruction and harmful practices such as retention in grade and tracking.” If our expensive education has taught us anything, then, it should be that testing that conforms to such a description has no place within the remit of broad, multi-skilled, interdisciplinary education that institutions such as Georgetown are supposed to provide. Moreover, repeated debates over the alleged bias of standardized tests toward certain backgrounds, which include both racial and class biases make a case for standardized testing even weaker. This should be welcomed on our campus. Anyone who feels they could boil down, for example, the strengths and weaknesses of complex interdependence theory or (even a bite-size fragment of) Michel Foucault’s writing into a multiple choice question capable of measuring anything worthwhile either possesses analytical genius far beyond my own comprehension or needs to hit the books before midterms. The sort of knowledge shared at universities is deliberately full of debate and uncertainty; there simply aren’t enough checkboxes to cover it.The emerging program is voluntary, for now, but it is backed by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges. Private institutions are more skeptical, and we must praise them for this and urge that they stick to their guns on the issue. It is important that we are more than statistics that can be brandished by over-zealous parents who want a means to prove their kid is definitively, legally smarter than yours; our education is about far more than numbers. If we want to keep claiming that we are broadening ourselves and pursuing “knowledge,” not simply cold, hard cash, we must reject moves towards standardization and emphasize the inherent and crippling narrowing of learning objectives it would entail. Allowing it to infiltrate our system of higher education in anything other than a peripheral way would be degrading to dedicated students and would fundamentally alter the way faculty are supposed to teach.”What does cura personalis mean? Please circle the correct answer.””