In more than 70 percent of universities, placement tests determine whether students should take corrective courses. If these tests are inaccurate, students can be incorrectly placed on a remediation track and enrolled in unbalanced classes that delay their degrees and increase the cost of their education.
A working document, one in a series issued by the National Office of Economic Research in June, suggests that the placement tests could be replaced by an algorithm that uses a set of larger measures to predict If a student would be successful in college credit collection courses.
The authors developed an algorithm and proved it in an experiment that included 12,544 first-year students in seven different community universities in the State System of New York University, observing a subsample of students for two years . The goal was to see how the placements changed as a result of the algorithm, and if the algorithm assigned students to courses at the university level at higher rates than placement tests. The researchers also wanted to know if the students placed by the algorithm passed their courses as expected.
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The results were promising. The algorithm produced more students who were placed in college-level classes. Students assigned to class levels by the algorithm were 6.6 percentage points more likely to be placed in a college-level mathematics course and 2.6 percentage points more likely to enroll in a college-level mathematics course. They were also 1.9 percentage points more likely to approve the course in their first term.
Differences were even more Stark for English classes. Students placed by the algorithm were 32 percentage points that get more in an English course at a college level, 14 percentage points are more likely to register and seven percentage points more likely to pass the course in the first term.
"Perhaps the greatest relief is that the predictions of the algorithm seemed to assume," the co-author Peter Bergman, the associate professor of the economy and education at Columbia University's Teachers College, said in an email. "This is a relief, because without running an experiment, you do not know if the assumptions that support the validity of the algorithm will remain in practice, and it seems that they did it, which is great news."
The investigation was performed by the center for the analysis of postsecondary preparation in the teachers of the University and supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, Statistics, Research and Evaluation. Arm of the United States Department of Education. The experiment showed that the students placed by the algorithm were assigned more often and registered in mathematics and English courses at the university level, and, as a result, obtained more university credits compared to their peers whose course tests were determined by the tests usual Students assigned by the algorithm also passed courses at the university level at par rates with their peers.
The findings of the experiment are in line with a long-standing research body that determined that students who took placement tests indicating must be enrolled in non-accredited recovery courses, often do well in the University level courses. There has also been a broad recognition among higher education leaders in recent years, courses that are not credit, not only the progress of slow students towards graduation, but can hurt persistence rates, especially for students Of color that have been overdamed for a long time to the development courts. Universities have increasingly resorted to other models, such as central courses, development classes taken together with university-level courses and additional tutorials and other academic support to address continuous concerns about
