Higher education has placed an increasingly greater value on assessment. The Learning Loss Scale may be an appropriate tool to assess learning across disciplines. In this paper, we review the culture of assessment, conceptualizations of cognitive learning, the Learning Loss Scale, and a theoretical explanation, and then we test this measure to evaluate the appropriateness of the scale for cognitive learning assessment in communication and beyond. We examine the Learning Loss Scale through two studies that illustrate validity concerns of previous findings by showing either a smaller or no relationship between the scale scores and performative cognitive learning measures.