Mazur has written a book about his teaching and evaluating methods, and professors around the nation have begun to use them in recent years. Roughly 250 colleges, including Harvard, are using a critical-thinking test just developed a few years ago. The schools include Florida State University, the University of Texas system, Duke University, Lesley University in Cambridge and Wheaton College in Norton.

A task force set up by two national college groups, which represent more than 600 schools, including public ones as well as Cornell and MIT, are evaluating various new options for measuring students' progress. The panel intends to create a voluntary system of accountability to respond to the Spellings commission's recommendations.

Arthur Kleinman, a Harvard professor of medical anthropology, is particularly worried about the effect of more testing and of publicizing the results on higher education -- fearing an outcome of standardization and unhealthy competition.

"We live increasingly in an audit world, in a regulatory world," Kleinman said. ‘‘Once you start this, there's no stopping it. It's going to become a part of the culture of higher education."

MUCH TO GAIN

Lesser-known colleges have everything to gain by revealing results because unlike Harvard, they often take students with mediocre academic records and turn them into great scholars, said Ronald Crutcher, Wheaton's president. The college plans to post results of the critical-thinking test and other evaluations on its Website, aiming the information at prospective students and parents.

Several Harvard professors said it was more important to evaluate students for the sake of improving teaching than to give information to consumers. Some caution against putting too much stock in certain tests because Harvard students -- so smart to begin with -- likely would progress if professors did nothing.

"You could put every Harvard student in a subterranean vault for four years, and they'd still grow," said Louis Menand, a Harvard professor of English, American literature and language.

But parents of all students have a right to know how well they're doing, said Sara Martinez Tucker, an Education Department undersecretary working with the national commission and accreditors.

"We can't get away from the fact that we're in an era of greater accountability," Tucker said. ‘‘People want to know where their dollars are going."

Bok is not keen on sharing results with the public, partly because the tests are unproven, but he is insistent about the need for the testing:

"It's particularly important at a place like Harvard. One can go on in fool's paradise and say, ‘They're going off and doing great things.' No one knows how much we contribute to that. They came in as good students."

A January report by a Harvard committee of professors called for the university to do more to improve teaching and evaluate learning. It also said Harvard rewards cutting-edge academic research but tends to shove the importance of improving teaching to the side, particularly in tenure reviews.

Harvard and other universities eventually might have to go public with results, predicts Bok.

"If the college faculties continue to make so little effort to figure out how well they're doing, then they have only themselves to blame if the government comes out and imposes accountability," he said.