Two-year colleges provide access and opportunity for students with various academic backgrounds to pursue a post-secondary education. While two-year colleges take pride in admitting any student with a high school diploma or equivalent, in recent years colleges have been under scrutiny for low completion and graduation rates. Particular attention…

Historically, colleges have used standardized testing to determine whether a student is ready for college-level work or requires developmental courses first, but this method has been criticized as inaccurate. To obtain more accurate placements, nearly three-quarters of colleges now use multiple measures assessment (MMA) systems. These systems…

In 2015, Tennessee community colleges initiated a wave of national reform that reimagined academic support and accelerated student success. Through innovations in the delivery of targeted learning support, such as the corequisite support model, students are more likely to achieve key milestones of success in their first year of college. Now, after…

Despite evidence suggesting that standardized tests are an imperfect measure of academic readiness, many community colleges across the country rely on them alone to determine student course placement. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced campuses to transition to remote operations in spring 2020, proctoring in-person placement tests became…

How should colleges determine whether students are placed into developmental or college-level courses? Each year, colleges place millions of students into developmental math and English courses upon enrollment. To do so, colleges most often use a high-stakes placement test, which numerous research studies have shown to be highly inaccurate in…

Colleges throughout the United States are evaluating the effectiveness of the strategies used to decide whether to place students into college-level or developmental education courses. Developmental, or remedial, courses are designed to develop the reading, writing, or math skills of students deemed underprepared for college-level courses, a…

Improving college completion is a shared objective of higher education. It is the focus of colleges, foundations, state governments, and the White House. Students have gotten the message--their aspirations are on the rise. But the nation's collective ambition far exceeds today's outcomes. Many students are not attaining their goals. College…

Placement exams are high-stakes assessments that determine many students' college trajectories. More than half of entering students at community colleges are placed into developmental education in at least one subject, based primarily on scores from these assessments, yet recent research fails to find evidence that placement into remediation…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe how and why Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ) has developed a system aiming to effectively place students in freshman and developmental English programs. The placement system includes: triangulating data from external test scores, with scores from a panel-marked hand-written essay (HWE),…

Three types of evaluation methods are discussed in terms of their use in evaluating both cognitive and affective learning in developmental programs: standardized tests; criterion-referenced tests; and naturalistic inquiries. Section I looks at the complexities of learning and the inherent difficulties in judging the quality and quantity of what is…

When the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges compiled best practices for serving basic skills students in 2002-2003, assessment practices were notably absent. In this paper, problems with current assessment and placement practices with regards to basic skills are explored. The paper begins with a review of the matriculation process…