The displacement of placement tests

The Compass is being phased out. And now that the college is looking into other options, it brings to mind how valuable placement tests really have been over the years, and if their necessity is really what it seems.

There could be numerous factors as to why students may not succeed in a placement test. It could take hours, and fatigue could lessen a student’s effectiveness, it could be that they have simply forgotten a certain aspect of a test, and as tests like the Compass adapt to their answers and lessen the difficulty of them, soon putting the student on a path that would lead to a student being placed into a lower level class when they normally have the ability to take the higher level classes, but simply needed clarification on one particular subject.

It appears to be that Pierce College may be moving away from placement tests like the Compass or Accuplacer, though there are talks about the College Board organization adapting the Accuplacer to be much more of an accessible tool, the American College Testing organization’s response to disjointed data and stats is to completely remove their placement test that rivaled the Accuplacer for so long. But Pierce supposedly may still look for other options away from both organizations.

There is an underlying belief that students should not be placed in “boxes,” that student success and what they get from education is subjective, and can be interpreted very differently compared to what other people think. Though it is true intelligence cannot be measured or categorized without a large amount of people’s experiences and abilities diverging from whatever chart or category their intelligence was put in, there will always be a scientific pattern leaning on way or another of the effectiveness of education.

This factors into placement tests as well, the mathematics instructor David Lippman said that there were studies showing that there was indeed about 70 percent of students who did well in the classes they were placed into based off of the results from the Compass test, but that still means there were about 30 percent students who were displaced and their time, money, and education, were all wasted from the placement test’s error.

This test was the 2010 assessment study from the Ohlone College in Fremont California. The percentage of students who said they were properly placed was far fewer than what the instructors believed, and what the placement test decided for them.

Now if this margin looked about 90 or even 85 percent accuracy, then this issue wouldn’t be a problem at all, some students just fail classes, and that’s that. Whether they don’t do the work or the courses they chose weren’t anything that they really understood.

But this percentage of failure versus success was a large enough gap that led to the ACT removing the test all together. “A thorough analysis of customer feedback, empirical evidence, and postsecondary trends led us to conclude that ACT Compass is not contributing as effectively to student placement and success as it had in the past.”

Different forms of placement testing that has led to the existence of the Compass and Accuplacer dates back to the mid 1800’s, but generations can vary drastically from one another depending on the type of world they live in. Students who only knew what they learned in class back in the 1970’s may not be the same as students today who have access to an endless source of information in their digital devices.

Perhaps college’s possible departure from placement tests is for the better, changing that 72 percent satisfactory margin towards 80, or even 90 percent accuracy. That students will have the opportunity to take classes that properly challenged them and pushed their professional knowledge, to better their chances for success, and to improve their education for an ever changing world.