A study was conducted at Pima Community College to determine the relationship between the final grade received by students in an introductory, algebra-based physics course (PHY 121) and their scores on the reading, writing, and mathematics portions of the college's nonmandatory assessment test. Between 1983 and 1988, 639 students obtained a final grade in PHY 121. Of these, 558 took the Nelson-Denny Reading Test (NDRT), 280 took a locally developed writing test, and 431 took a locally developed math test. When correlation coefficients were examined, the test result most highly correlated with successful completion of PHY 121 was the NDRT score, followed by the Pima College Math Test score. Other study findings included the following: (1) on average, students who took the NDRT read at a 13.8 grade level; (2) 84.2% of the students entered PHY 121 without the prerequisite math skills, indicating that either the prerequisite was inappropriate for the course or the math portion of the test was an inaccurate measure of student ability; and (3) 48.8% of the students who took the writing test were placed in a developmental writing course, compared to 17.8% who were placed in Freshman Composition. (AJL)