New Studies Show College Placement Tests are Ineffective

[marmar]

New Studies Show College Placement Tests are Ineffective


Susan Headden had an important article in the September/October issue of the Monthly running down the problem with community colleges’ high-stakes placement tests, which often wrongly assign students to remedial courses, costing them some very valuable time and money.

A good example is what happened to Monica Dekany, who enrolled at Golden West College in Huntington Beach, California in 2009:

All she had to do, the registrars told her after she paid her fee, was go down a hallway, pick a cubicle, sidle up to a computer terminal, and take a short test. The “Accuplacer,” as the test is called, was no big deal, they said—nothing she could have studied for. It was just so they could see where she was. Dekany took one test in math and another in English, and was “floored,” as she put it, to learn that she had scored at a level that would consign her to remedial classes, reviews of fundamental material for which she would receive no college credit. “It caught me totally off guard,” Dekany says. The other colleges had let her enroll directly in college-level English and literature classes, and as her transcripts clearly showed, she had passed them. But Golden West told her the test results were all that mattered.

Dekany dutifully enrolled in, and paid for, the remedial—or what colleges euphemistically call “developmental”—courses. She knew everything in the English course already; her daughter’s seventh-grade English class was more advanced. Her math course was similarly low level, but it was taught by a sympathetic professor who helped save her from further remedial work. The college had mandated that Dekany take a second remedial math class before being allowed to take Math 100 for college credit, but her professor thought the requirement made no sense—she was clearly ready for college work. So he arranged for her to take Math 100 at Cal State, Long Beach, where he happened to also teach, and there she got an A.

Dekany ended up thriving despite the obstacles thrown up by the Accuplacer, but many students, already throwing their lives into a bit of chaos by fitting in school with everything else, do not. And now two new studies out of Columbia’s Community College Research Center buttress the notion that these tests flawed. ........................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/819248/new_studies_show_college_placement_tests_are_ineffective/

[midnight]

1. Since no child left behind, testing has been a lucrative business...

[rfranklin]

2. Profit is the objective behind 90% of the Race to the Top and other efforts to...

convince us that we need to test and privatize.

[exboyfil]

3. It is crap that you can't prepare for these tests by

studying. I wanted to get my daughter qualified for Precalculus over the summer, but I also wanted to get it done early this year (before she had seen the second half of her Advanced Algebra/Trig) class. We grabbed a COMPASS preparation book from the library and all of the sample tests online (and their are several) and she went through the College Algebra portion. We did not bother with Trig since it was not a requirement for Precalculus. I suspect that by the end of this semester, she probably could pass the Trig part as well and eligible to take Calculus I.

No way that the test results should have overridden the college credit. Articulation agreements should be in place to stop this from happening. It reinforces my belief that most counselors do not know what they are doing.

I would not necessarily blame the test though. In the case of students coming out of High School or not having taken the class in several years, they need some method of placing individuals. At least for the COMPASS test you have a short waiting period before you can take it again. I thought it did a pretty good job assessing my daughter. My daughter maxed out the Reading and Writing parts, and it was recommended that she look to CLEP the first Composition course. This is with only 1 semester of 10th grade English.