The Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) is a standardized testing initiative in United States higher educational evaluation and assessment. It uses a "value-added" outcome model to examine a college or university's contribution to student learning which relies on the institution, rather than the individual student, as the primary unit of analysis. The CLA measures are designed to test for critical thinking, analytic reasoning, problem solving, and written communication skills. The assessment consists of open-ended questions, is administered to students online, and controls for incoming academic ability. An institution's average score on the CLA measures correlates highly with the institution's average SAT score (r = 0.90). Institutional results are not published. History and Test Format The CLA was first launched in 2000 by the Council for Aid to Education (CAE), a national nonprofit organization based in New York City. Rather than testing for specific content knowledge gained in particular courses or majors, the intent was to assess “the collective and cumulative result of what takes place or does not take place over the four to six years of undergraduate education in and out of the classroom. Of the entire test, the most well-developed and sophisticated part is its performance task component, in which students are given ninety minutes to respond to a writing prompt that is associated with a set of background documents. The testing materials, including the documents, are accessed through a computer. CAE has published several examples of representative performance tasks, one of which is described below (from Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses): The “DynaTech” performance task asks students to generate a memo advising an employer about the desirability of purchasing a type of airplane that has recently crashed. Students are informed: “You are the assistant to Pat Williams, the president of DynaTech, a company that makes precision electronic instruments and navigational equipment. Sally Evans, a member of DynaTech’s sales force, recommended that DynaTech buy a small private plane (a SwiftAir 235) that she and other members of the sales force could use to visit customers. Pat was about to approve the purchase when there was an accident involving a SwiftAir 235.” Students are provided with the following set of documents for this activity: newspaper articles about the accident, a federal accident report on in-flight breakups in single engine planes, Pat Williams’s e-mail to her assistant and Sally Evans’s e-mail to Pat Williams, charts on SwiftAir’s performance characteristics,