This study attempted to validate the use of academic growth and development items from Tennessee alumni surveys as measures of program quality and effectiveness at the University of Tennessee (UTK), Knoxville. The argument is made that it is essential that the instruments used to assess students educational outcomes be valid measures of the goals of the education program being evaluated and that the empirical structure of assessment data reflect the structure of the outcomes being measured as well as being sensitive to the educational experiences of students. The validation methodology focused on three aspects of construct validity: (1) construct representativeness; (2) structural fidelity; and (3) criterion relatedness. Survey analysis of two randomly-selected samples of 500 alumni from both 1988 and 1990 revealed that the academic growth and development items on the survey represent approximately 50 percent of the goals of the general education program at UTK, had a stable structure that is generally consistent with the structure of the UTK goals, and were significantly related to college experiences. Contains 40 references. (GLR)