Outcomes Assessment

I see that Blackboard recently improved its LMS by adding an outcomes widget. Outcomes. Assessment. A culture of assessment. Continuous assessment. I'm not sure that it really matters what one teaches; the teacher's mission is to engage in a culture of continuous assessment.

I keep hearing that to live the life of assessment (or is the life of outcomes?) the teacher must have specific goals and objectives and how one measures the outcome of the goals and objectives and that this is best achieved by stuffing things into a rubric. Why does the word "rubric" always sound obscene? At any rate I think of a rubric as three-dimensional though I find it odd that the people who most often speak of rubrics are fairly two-dimensional people.

Presumably all this outcomes measurements activities goingson have to do with taking minds and adding to them. People who speak of outcomes and assessments also tend to use the phrase "value added."