Book excerpt: The study is based on data from 50+ North American colleges with data broken out by size and type of college, level of tuition and public/private status. The report covers institutional requirements for departmental assessment plans, policies on both faculty and student assessment, standardized test administration, outreach to students for assessment purposes, graduation requirements, and the institutional politics around assessment issues. The report also gives key benchmarking data on the size and budget of the college assessment office, or other office that performs similar functions. The study helps college administrators to answer questions such as: what are colleges doing in student and faculty assessment? What resources are being spent? What have colleges found to be successful? How have their efforts changed in the past few years and how are they likely to change in the future? What kind of assessment technologies and strategies are they finding useful? How are they reacting to new pressures from the Federal and state governments to demonstrate effectiveness as educators?