In the fall of 1981, author Peter Ewell, President Emeritus of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS), moved to Boulder, Colorado to direct a project funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation entitled "Using Information on Student Outcomes to Improve Program Planning and Decision-Making." Before this point--not quite forty years ago--the term "student outcomes" was not widely used in American higher education. Principal topics of concern were costs and finance, governance, student retention and completion, and faculty preparation and renewal; it was pretty much assumed that when teaching took place in college classrooms, learning occurred in equal measure. All that changed in the wake of "A Nation at Risk" in 1983--a watershed study that questioned how much learning was actually taking place in K-12 classrooms. This was followed by equivalent concerns in higher education a year or two later with the publication of "Involvement in Learning" by the National Institute for Education (NIE) and Integrity in the College Curriculum by the Association of American Colleges (AAC). The "assessment movement" in higher education that resulted from these two publications is thus conventionally dated from the first national conference on assessment held in Columbia South Carolina in 1985. Since that time, for better or worse, "assessment" has been an inescapable and controversial subject. Policymakers demand it, many faculty members protest and resent it, and administrators comply with it while trying to mitigate its effects on fragile academic structures and cultures. How did education get here? More important, has there been any real progress? In this essay, Ewell first addresses these questions by briefly highlighting three critical choices that were made in assessment's brief history that have decisively shaped where things are today. In the second part of the essay, Ewell suggests some productive ways forward to resolve the contradictions.