The Wabash National Study was created by the authors of this article in the early 2000s as a response to increasing pressure for institutions to get serious about assessment. The Wabash National Study was a multimillion dollar, 40-plus-institution, longitudinal research and assessment project that measured liberal learning outcomes and the good practices that promoted the development of those outcomes. Five years into the study, the authors were grappling with the question of why there was so little utilization of data after so much data collection. They realized that most institutions were not using data from their study to drive improvements in student learning. This article addresses the following questions: (1) When does data make a difference?; and (2) What is the goal of assessment? The authors state that is is worth considering how often people use the term assessment to refer to processes of collecting, making sense of, and acting on data related to student learning, and then testing to learn whether those actions had the intended effect, or whether they are referring to keeping an eye on its data collection.