RUME 27
2025
Alexandria, Virginia
Can a Single Placement Test Effectively Place Students Into Different Math Pathways?
Page: 653
Math placement policies are intended to match incoming freshmen with an appropriate math course. At our four-year institution, the same placement test is used to place students into nine courses across three pathways. In this paper we use institutional data to analyze the effectiveness of test-based placement into different courses requiring similar (and sometimes the same) cutscore. We use the classification power metric to evaluate and compare the effectiveness of three placement policies. We report that that placement tests provide minimal information about students’ readiness for mathematics courses that are not algebra intensive, such as basic statistics.