By Erik Cooper

Competency-based education (CBE) could revolutionize how we approach student learning—focusing on mastery rather than seat time. In this blog, you’ll learn what’s at stake, what’s holding us back, and why the time is right to make the shift.

An English professor friend of mine and I were having lunch, and the conversation turned to education reform. He told me about his son’s swim team and how the swimmers would show up at various times and with different skill levels. The coach would adapt the training to meet those students where they were. It was an example of real-world learner-centered teaching.

My friend started thinking about how that would apply in his classroom. How could he adapt his teaching to focus only on the things that students entering at different points in a semester needed to work on? This idea of assessing students’ competencies and helping them develop the skills they need is central to CBE.

What Is Competency-Based Education?

The idea behind CBE is that many students enter a class with some skills in or some knowledge about the course’s topic or content. If a teacher has a clear outline of the skills, outcomes, or competencies that a student should have by the time they leave a course, the teacher can evaluate where the student is relative to those competencies and then spend time teaching what the student needs to learn.

Essentially, CBE allows students to move through course material as they show proficiency in specific skills or knowledge—rather than strictly by accumulating seat time.

Potential Benefits of Competency-Based Education

Many learners have experienced the frustration of taking a class in which the first few weeks—maybe even the entire class—felt like review. Conversely, have you ever been in a class where you felt lost right from the start? CBE can help avoid these situations by allowing students to:

  • Skip review periods for content they’ve already mastered
  • Focus learning time exclusively on new content and areas where they need support
  • Earn credit for courses when they can demonstrate they already meet competency requirements
  • Receive targeted support from the start from teachers who understand their learning needs

I’m not saying that CBE is easy for faculty. But if we can clearly state what skills and levels of competency or proficiency a student needs to have, teaching can also be more enjoyable for faculty. They can offer a more individualized experience for students instead of repeating the same information in the same way they have in the past.

Barriers to Implementing Competency-Based Education

So, what’s stopping us from adopting CBE?

The Challenge of Moving Beyond Seat Time

If you have attended college, you are probably familiar with units. For colleges and universities using the semester system, most classes are 3 units, and for the quarter system, classes are generally 4 units. For convenience, I refer only to semester colleges from this point on, but feel free to multiply anything I say by 1.5 to get to quarter units. (It does not work perfectly for every class or situation, but it’s close.)

So, a student typically needs 60 units to earn an associate degree and 120 units for most bachelor’s degrees. While the Carnegie Foundation originally developed the unit (or student hour) to help account for faculty retirement credit, it quickly spread as a mechanism to standardize secondary and postsecondary coursework for students.

While the Carnegie Unit helped standardize aspects of education, it accounts for the time that a student spent in a classroom but not for whether a student gained the knowledge, skills, or abilities the course is intended to teach.

When we consider the differences in how colleges and universities operate, how professors teach, and how students learn, the Carnegie Unit is probably the easiest way to ensure parity. But it is not useful in determining what a student learned, how they will perform in a job, or how they can use those skills in new situations.

So, the current system we have is an easy system to measure student progress in terms of time spent with the course content. But measuring student progress in terms of competency is more difficult. Developing competency requirements for every course takes time and resources. Attempting to standardize those competency requirements across hundreds of institutions nationwide is a daunting task.

Balancing Academic Freedom with Standardization

There is also the political reality that institutions, departments, and faculty want to be able to teach a course in a manner aligned with their mission or unique to their perspective of the topic. The core principle of academic freedom—that teaching on a subject should be free from outside interference and that the course is best taught by the faculty who are experts in the subject matter—is what makes the implementation of CBE difficult.

The Foundation Is Already in Place

Despite these challenges, the time is right to start moving toward CBE. Several universities incorporate CBE into specific programs that allow students to demonstrate their knowledge or abilities to meet specific course requirements. Several college systems have adopted or are adopting common course numbers that show that common courses are effectively the same regardless of where the courses were offered. Large systems of articulation, such as those documented in Assist.org in California, show that there is already alignment between courses at community colleges and state-run universities.

In short, we have already established that these courses are equivalent. Now is the time to have conversations about what knowledge and competencies those courses teach.

This brings us back to the beginning. Once faculty have clear and common expectations for what a student should be able to do by the end of the class—not just the content to be covered—their role can shift. Faculty can focus on ensuring that students are learning instead of just ensuring that they are covering the content.

The shift to CBE will not be easy. It does not have the easy appeal of the Carnegie Unit, but it has the advantage of clearly articulating both what a student should know and what they do know.

Contact Erik Cooper for more information, resources, or to discuss how CBE could work in your context.

Erik Cooper is leading the team to build integrated, longitudinal data systems across the country. He helped develop the California Community Colleges DataVista dashboard and is helping develop similar systems. With over 20 years of experience across higher education in multiple states, including roughly 15 years with two California community colleges and the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, Erik has extensive experience stitching together complex data systems and turning that data into useful information. He has an MS in psychology and neuroscience from the University of Oregon and a BA in psychology and an EdD in educational leadership from Sac State.