Community college placement tests chronically underestimate student potential, says study
Students enrolling in two-year colleges may be up against unfair odds when it comes to being placed into the right courses for their true academic level, according to results from two recent studies. The Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College did studies on the two most-widely used placement exams at two-year colleges, the COMPASS and the ACUPLACER, using data from 42,000 first-time students at a large, urban two-year college sysetm. The researchers found that one-third of the students who placed in remedial level courses could have passed college-level classes in those areas, earning at least a B as a final grade.
“We find that placement tests do not yield strong predictions of how students will perform in college,” the report reads, according to Inside HigherEd. “In contrast, high school GPAs are useful for predicting many aspects of students’ college performance.”
The report’s author, Judith Scott-Clayton, goes on to find that “severe misplacements” can be avoided by using more than just placement exams in determining what courses an incoming student should take, adding that up 15 percent of those bad placements could be avoided in doing so. The researcher argues that adding other factors to the placement equation could even reduce the community college remediation rate by 8 percent to 12 percent, if done properly, and keep success rates the same — or promote improvement.
“We hear a lot about the high rates of failure in college-level classes at community colleges,” Scott-Clayton told The New York Times. “Those are very visible. What’s harder to see are the students who could have done well at college level but never got the chance because of these placement tests.”
Apparently, the latest data is not news to everyone. Some education stakeholders say the study’s findings are yet another piece of evidence to be used in the arguments of many community college administrators who have already voiced concerns with the placement exams.
“I haven’t seen the studies, but what I do know is that when I talk with leaders of community colleges, a lot of them have issues with the diagnostic tests and sense that far too many students are being put in developmental, remedial education, especially in math,” Walter G. Bumphus, president of the American Association of Community Colleges, said in the NYT article. “Almost every one of them has some plan to change that.”
