There is an old Pennsylvania Dutch proverb that goes, “We grow too soon old and too late smart.” Some colleges still have a youthful outlook. “In the last few years, however, a cottage industry has sprouted up in academe to measure whether students are actually learning and to reform classes that don’t deliver,” Robin Wilson wrote in the September 10, 2010 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. “Accreditors now press colleges to show that they are teaching what students need to know.” It’s an uphill battle. “Faculty rewards have nothing to do with the ability to assess student learning,”...